The Captive / The Fugitive (In Search of Lost Time, #5-6) by Marcel Proust

The Captive / The Fugitive (In Search of Lost Time, #5-6) Reviews

• 
  karen

  gore. juss. seriously - a perfect book. i am reviewing the captive and the fugitive. separately because even though modern library publishes them together in one volume, i don't want to lose this high i am on after reading the captive. what if the fugitive isn't as good!!?? i will not have the luster worn off my glee!
  
  seriously, by the fifth installment, is anyone even paying attention anymore?? who remembers the fifth of anything?
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  but this one - i reacted to it the way most people reacted to swann's way. this is absolutely what i expected, in my most hopeful moods, proust would be.
  
  that glorious minutia!! but this time, it is all about that awkward transitional period of a romantic entanglement where you don't want the other person anymore, but you don't yet want them to be with anyone else, either. but this character being who he is, he takes it a little too far and becomes freaking crazy with it, wanting the other person to make the break in order to assuage his guilt; thinking and thinking and thinking and strategizing. but along the way, making some really astute commentaries on human relationships and the love process.
  
  i started out with this one, like all the rest, going bookmark-crazy every time i came across a passage i thought was lovely or reminiscent of something in my own life, but if i had kept it up, there would have been a bookmark on every page. at one point, i realized it was getting out of control, and i just gave up and decided - the whole thing is a bookmark.
  
  a number of relationships come to an end in this volume - all handled rather poorly, and all fairly devastating. severance is rarely tidy, but lord there are some drawn-out situations, and this time morel wears the king douchebag hat...
  
  this is about the slow poisonous nature of unfit relationships. the way that each participant is changed by the relationship itself into something opposite of what sparked the initial attraction. all the bitterness, the lies, the jealous accusations, and the unspoken fears. his psychology is so complicated and intense, but in this particular subject matter, frighteningly relatable for me.not that i am a crazy, but i have had relationships, blessedly long ago, that put me into positions that were as uncomfortable as anything written here.
  
  i had an english teacher in high school who would distill every book we read to two phrases: it was "an allegory of society", or it represented "the universality of mankind", which never made any sense to me. not "the commonality of human experience", but "the universality of mankind". despite its clunkiness and its failure as a phrase to mean anything at all, it kept popping into my head when i was reading this. i have been the captive albertine, i have been the captive marcel (now that we can use the name; now that he has finally given a "name" in this volume) i have been morel, and charlus, and jupien's daughter (whose name i can't even remember right now) and all of them at one point in my life. relationships get messy. and proust writes them so well, it dredges up every memory i had of every failed relationship, but in a good, "phew" way.
  
  and that ending! thomas hardy or saki couldn't have done it better. they would have done it shorter, but not better.am taking my three-book break now but i am rarin' to get into book 6. i don't even know if i have left enough room to review it in this space. oops. proustfail.
  
  
  
  
  it says i have 16,141 characters left. is that enough?? i don't do math.
  
  
  come to my blog!
• 
  Adam Dalva

  Though these segments of Proust's novel are bundled together, I'm going to treat them as separate entities:
  
  Though there are of course great moments - the first reveal, 3,300 pages in, of the protagonist's name, which is like the sun bursting through a foggy afternoon; the cliffhanger ending; the reappearance of certain traits of Marcel's great-aunt in Combray - THE CAPTIVE is my personal low point of I.S.o.L.T., a long, obsessive meander through the protagonist's most frustrating tendencies (jealousy, homophobia). When this book suffers, it's usually because Proust writes with authority and at great length about subjects about which he is fundamentally mistaken. The "captivity" of Albertine is a frustrating plotline, and at 550 pages, leaves the viewer little breathing room. It took me weeks to get through it.
  
  But persevere, because THE FUGITIVE is extraordinary. It stands with SWANN IN LOVE as a high point of this great work. It's a series of 4 vignettes, each of which permanently modifies and smashes together characters who we have come to love (Albertine, Gilberte, Mama, St. Loup), to relish in (Charlus, Legrandin, Jupien and his niece), to distrust (Morel, Monsieur de Norpois). This sudden flowering of action and time and location (I won't spoil it) is the perfect counterbalance to THE CAPTIVE, and more importantly, continues the work of SODOM AND GOMORRAH in rounding out the novel's plot. Many seemingly minor scenes recur and are made complicated - many things that we have long been waiting for come to pass. It's a remarkable achievement.
  
  I added 3.9 to 5.2 and rounded up. I can't imagine anyone would get this far and then give in, but if you find yourself floundering in THE CAPTIVE, have courage.
• 
  Violet wells

  This is the part where Proust puts love under the scalpel. Sexual love. Proust seeks to show us that it is largely delusion. The romantic imagination acting as a magic wand. The transfiguring stardust possessing a limited shelf life. And how the romantic imagination can coax its owner into playing tyrant and jailor. The romantic imagination seen as a controlling mechanism of the mind. A disseminator of lies and delusions.
  
  But it's Proust so ironies abound. Our narrator keeps Albertine under house arrest in a room of his apartment. A situation he keeps secret from friends and family. (Another indictment of Marcel's monstrous snobbery: Proust often ridicules snobbery in his book while at the same time falling prey to it just as often: it's a constant sub-plot). He pays servants to spy on her whenever she goes out. He suspects her of betraying him - but with other girls. Marcel has a distaste for the love that dare not speak its name. It's another example of his meshing of autobiography with fiction, of making Marcel Marcel and not making him Marcel. He goes on to deliver up a succession of lectures about the nature of love. But his feeling for Albertine strikes us as having more in common with a sickness than what most of us experience as love. Which is perhaps why these meditations on the nature of love sometimes ring false. Proust is much more Henry James than he is DH Lawrence, especially when he's denying his own sexual nature in his narrative.
  
  Proust was a pioneer. He gets excited about things we now take for granted. In this respect there are times when you have to try to read him retrospectively. And of course Proust is all about life as experienced retrospectively. Sometimes it's like being in a hall of mirrors. Which of course is the nature of memory, the nature of trying to retrieve lost time. I often found myself marvelling at how many writers he has greatly influenced. It's extraordinary how many doors he opened for the novel.
  
  
  Marcel finally makes it to Venice in this part. This turned out to be something of an anti-climax for me as reader. There are no epiphanies. Nor does he especially bring the city alive. I was looking forward to some sumptuous descriptions. Never happened.
  
  I suppose I've discovered I'm never going to wholeheartedly love Proust. I can only read ten pages of him at a time. And often I find myself getting lost and confused in his labyrinthine sentences. He's one of very few novelists I don't always understand. In this respect he is more poet than novelist. I admire him most of all for the influence he had on some of my favourite writers rather than for himself. Onto the last part. But I know now this wouldn't be one of the books I'd take to a desert island.
  
• 
  Aubrey

  But in exchange for what our imagination leads us to expect and we give ourselves so much futile trouble trying to find, life gives us something which we were very far from imagining.

  If you have come thus far in this search for time lost, here you may remember that, as unfeasible as it may seem, this is in fact but a part of a single work, one that built and built and has finally started to wind its way slowly down trains of thought already distilled, running on rails made efficient by readerly familiarity. It is not the end, not yet, but still there is the lingering sense of something other than the constant growth and spread of pure novelty of Swann, Flower, Guermantes, Sodom; rather than the youth of yore, the rites of maturation have begun. For the narrator is as gorgeously incisive as before, but in the throes of capture and flight he begins, truly begins, to consider others as being capable of the same inconsistent desire, the same instantaneous flutters of heart and habitus. Here, time begins its return.
  
  The turnaround is slow, subtle, and fully explicated, as everything has ever been within the passes of these pages, but still much of a surprise, as while our narrator is a wonder with intimating at the countless facets of visual delight, relegating him to the category of 'spoiled brat' would be anything but too harsh a judgment. But, of course, his life has been a luxurious one, and it is a rare gift indeed to be considerate of others without ever having been forced to do so with little to no expectation of reward. If one wished to trivialize the matters bounded within the doubled novels of a single tome, it could be said that here, the narrator wins his toy long enough to become bored with it, and then has it taken away in such a manner that does not allow for any hint of retrieval, no matter how much the narrator wheedles or begs. But what is a mark of maturity if not the coming to terms with a incontrovertible refusal in such a way that enables a calmer, colder manner of evaluating the thwarting of future whims, fancies, dreams of any length and substantial measure? For if there's one thing to be said about having one's lifelong pursuits come to nothing, it's the resulting perspective and all the changes fortified on it.
  
  In shorter, simpler terms, the narrator in the course of this 'chapter' of this over four thousand page 'novel' is reaching the aging complacency of been there, done that, but is not yet quite fully there. As this is Proust, what would normally be sketched out in a few sentences in other pieces of fiction is rhapsodized on for hundreds of pages, and what would merit only a passing glance is here expanded on to a glorious extent, to the point that one cannot simply read the changes the narrator's thought patterns undergo, the return of so many figures of his youth long ago given up for good, the application of experience painstakingly incorporated into the character to current circumstance, the slow giving way of future hopes to a more thoughtful measuring of the mix of past and present, but feel them. Life forces itself on the narrator once and for all, and with his spoiled sensibilities slighted, his anxious back and forth of flighty indecision decapitated in the street, he submits to the reality and comes out the better for it. His acute sensitivity to the flow of influence and infinite variety of observation protects him from the worst of protective mechanisms via calcification of personality, and while still fickle and overwrought, his path through life is no longer a linear one of ever constant horizons and ever rejected familiarity. Past and future are beginning to coalesce within his grasp, and the present is becoming less of a search and more of a complex interchange between self, time, and circumstance with every passing instance; a newness less pristine, a habit less condemned.
  
  The sun has begun to set on the stage of this lengthy exploration of color, love, society, leaving a narrator beginning to learn that not all lost opportunities are worth forever mourning, that the paths of life led thus far are no less valuable for not having adhered to a past plan of action, however seemingly frivolous in nature or wasteful in scope of time. A beginning flicker of, yes, perhaps what one needs is not around the corner, an entirety necessitating a complete sacrifice of all that came before, but a hand in hand conjoining of accumulated self and subsequent surrounding. An acquiescence to the need of constant reevaluation, one inspiring and tiresome and inspiring again, fueled by nothing but a sense of one day looking back on it all and seeing something that, despite all the chaotic fumblings and discordant backtracks, shaped itself worthwhile. A day that has not yet come to pass, may never come to pass, will require so much for so long before coming to pass, and yet there is an undercurrent that will not be denied, a tidal flow that, for all its effacing tendencies on seaside shore, offers an integrated art of existence in flotsam left behind.

  Composers do not remember this lost fatherland, but each of them remains all his life unconsciously attuned to it; he is delirious with joy when he sings in harmony with his native land, betrays it at times with his thirst for fame, but then, in seeking fame, turns his back on it, and it is only by scorning fame that he finds it when he breaks out into that distinctive strain the sameness of which—for whatever its subject it remains identical with itself—proves the permanence of the elements that compose his soul. But in that case is it not true that those elements���all the residuum of reality which we are obliged to keep to ourselves, which cannot be transmitted in talk, even from friend to friend, from master to disciple, from lover to mistress, that ineffable something which differentiates qualitatively what each of us has felt and what he is obliged to leave behind at the threshold of the phrases in which he can communicate with others only by limiting himself to externals, common to all and of no interest—are brought out by art, the art of a Vinteuil like that of an Elstir, which exteriorises in the colours of the spectrum the intimate composition of those worlds which we call individuals and which, but for art, we should never know? A pair of wings, a different respiratory system, which enabled us to travel through space, would in no way help us, for if we visited Mars or Venus while keeping the same senses, they would clothe everything we could see in the same aspect as the things of Earth. The only true voyage, the only bath in the Fountain of Youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to see the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to see the hundred universes that each of them sees, that each of them is; and this we can do with an Elstir, with a Vinteuil; with men like these we do really fly from star to star.
• 
  Noel

  Recently, I reread a couple of essays in Walter Benjamin’s Illuminations, one of them being “The Image of Proust,” which led me to track down Jacques Rivière’s lectures on Proust (published in The Ideal Reader). Rivière was one of Proust’s earliest champions and clearly had a crush on him, but his reading of him aligns so closely with mine that I thought I might make a few notes, on a subject I haven’t talked about in my reviews of Proust: love.
  
  It’s important to note that in The Captive, the word “love,” already slightly injured from its use in Swann in Love, is smashed into jelly and is closer to sadomasochistic codependency than anything else: “Here I mean by love reciprocal torture.” Although, if Proust is to be believed, love is sadomasochistic codependency.
  
  Anyone who makes it at all far into the Search will notice that one of its theoretical foundations is that we can never know another human being, only the illusion we build up in our minds. Our conception of others is like an American comic strip. It looks convincing enough from a distance, but up close, it explodes into an abstract pattern of dots.
  
  
  Crying Girl, by Roy Lichtenstein.
  
  This has several consequences, but maybe the most disturbing is that throughout this (very long) novel, there are no actual characters, only projections of the narrator’s (Marcel’s) own self (and he’s hardly a character himself). The effect in the last two volumes is kind of like standing in a hall of mirrors with a mustachioed early-twentieth century Frenchman—or, you are a mustachioed early-twentieth century Frenchman, which is even more terrifying—and finding an infinite number of Frenchmen adjusting their cravats, giggling and guffawing about aristocratic lineages and place-name etymologies.
  
  If we only know an illusion of another human being, nowhere is the illusion more complete than in love. In Proust, love has virtually nothing to do with the characteristics of its object, even though they impose themselves on the subject later on. Rivière argues that a commonality between Proust and Freud is that for both, “love exists entirely ahead of time in its subject and that its assignment to such and such a person is provoked only by chance. … [B]oth lay great stress upon the fact that these are never anything but accidental, even if afterwards, the particular characteristics of the beloved object, having forced themselves upon the subject, can make him believe that they were what necessitated his choice, that no other choice was possible.” Proust would probably respond to the idea that people can “grow in love,” and not just be hit by Cupid’s arrow, with hysterical laughter.
  
  Rivière argues that another commonality between Proust and Freud (which is fundamentally the same as the previous one) is that for both, love, “before it attaches itself to anyone, is essentially anxiety, and that when this anxiety is increased, by an exterior, fortuitous cause, it becomes so very intolerable that resolves itself into love, which is then turned towards the being whom chance places within our reach at that moment” (manifesting as a obsessive need to know the unknowable Other completely, and its relations with its Others):
  
  “If you upset their plans for the day, they confess to you the pleasure they had concealed from you: ‘I did so want to go and have tea with so and so who I’m fond of.’ And then, six months later, if you come to know the person in question, you will learn that the girl whose plans you had upset, who, trapped, in order that you might set her free had confessed to you that she was thus in the habit of taking tea with a dear friend every day at the hour at which you did not see her, has never once been inside this person’s house, that they have never had tea together, since the girl used to explain that her whole time was taken up by none other than yourself. And so the person with whom she confessed that she was going to tea, with whom she begged you to allow her to go to tea, that person, a reason admitted by necessity, it was not her, it was somebody else, it was something else still! What something else? Which somebody else?
  
  “Alas, the multifaceted eyes, far-ranging and melancholy, might enable us perhaps to measure distance, but do not indicate direction. The boundless field of possibilities extends before us, and if by any chance the reality presented itself to our eyes, it would be so far outside the limits of the possible that, knocking suddenly against this looming wall, we should fall over backwards in a daze. It is not even essential that we should have proof of her movement and flight, it is enough that we should guess them. She had promised us a letter; we were calm, we were no longer in love. The letter has not come; each mail fails to bring it; what can have happened? Anxiety is born afresh, and love. It is such people more than any others who inspire love in us, to our desolation. For every new anxiety that we feel on their account strips them in our eyes of some of their personality. We were resigned to suffering, thinking that we loved outside ourselves, and we perceive that our love is a function of our sorrow, that our love perhaps is our sorrow, and that its object is only to a very small extent the girl with the raven hair. But, when all is said, it is such people more than any others who inspire love.”
  
  (Notice the use of the second person and first person plural to make the reader complicit.)
  
  Jealousy isn’t simply an effect of love but its cause. And this why, in Sodom and Gomorrah, even though Marcel had just made up his mind to break up with Albertine, when she makes a casual allusion to a female(!) friendship, he suddenly expresses a desire to (paraphrasing) inflict torments on her, isolate her, keep her under lock and key, and take from her the little money that she has—which he fulfills in The Captive by holding her, well, captive in his parents’ apartment (which he keeps a secret from his friends and family).
  
  This is completely insane… We might say that there’s a dual will to love: there’s egoistic love, the way a very young child loves its mother at first, only for what gives to it; and there’s altruistic love, the way a child cares for its mother herself, which comes with time—or for some, like Marcel, never comes at all. In Proust, love, as Rivière concludes, is totally without altruistic impulses. It’s always selfish. I would go further and say that Marcel comes across as a man arrested at an early stage of psychosexual development, doomed to strangle his love-object with the slimy tentacles of jealousy and even hatred.
  
  
  Sarah and Writhing Octopus, by Masami Teraoka.
  
  (Except, unlike the woman in this painting, Albertine is clearly not enjoying it.)
  
  In fact, Proust explicitly represents Marcel’s “love” for Albertine as a sublimation of the Oedipal feelings expressed in the opening pages of the novel, in which the young Marcel lay sleepless yearning for Maman to come and kiss him good night, and she did not come:
  
  “It was no longer the peace of my mother’s kiss at Combray that I felt when I was with Albertine on these evenings, but, on the contrary, the anguish of those on which my mother scarcely bade me good-night, or even did not come up to my room at all, either because she was cross with me or was kept downstairs by guests. This anguish—not merely its transposition into love but this anguish itself—which for a time had specialised in love and which, when the separation, the division of the passions occurred, had been assigned to love alone, now seemed once more to be extending to them all, to have become indivisible again as in my childhood, as though all my feelings, which trembled at the thought of my not being able to keep Albertine by my bedside, at once as a mistress, a sister, a daughter, and as a mother too, of whose regular good-night kiss I was beginning once more to feel the childish need, had begun to coalesce, to become unified in the premature evening of my life which seemed fated to be as short as a winter day.”
  
  (That childhood trauma never left him. This, I think, is the fourth or fifth time he makes this connection in this volume and the last.)
  
  So, in Proust’s handling of love, as in his handling of society, there’s another clash of sensibilities. For Proust, in love, there can’t be any interpenetration of selves, not in a sexual sense but in an intellectual one (or a spiritual one)—although that’s also conspicuously absent from the novel: as with Charlus and Morel, Proust suggests that Marcel and Albertine aren’t even having sex: “I was not perhaps her lover in the full sense of the word,” although it’s hard to think of what else they could be doing, cooped up in that apartment, for hundreds of pages… Anyway, Proust’s view of love is really a corollary of his view of life his general (what Rivière considers “a lacuna, or a deficiency”): that there can’t be “any contact between human beings”—as he’s maintained from the beginning—“any transfer from one to the other, any giving or any receiving.”
  
  Proust’s theory of love seems to me the result of a lifetime of unfulfilling relationships. At the risk of getting too personal, I’ve read a lot about Proust’s life (only because I’ve been reading this book for so, so long) and a lot of the weirder aspects of this novel make a world of sense in light of his love life—for example, Marcel’s insane jealousy over Albertine’s (possible) lesbian affairs, almost certainly a reflection of Proust’s fury when his bisexual male lovers went back to women (which, if it makes any sense in a gay relationship, is completely nonsensical when “transposed” onto a straight one).
• 
  Paul

  Again, the writing is so delicious that I tended to forget what an idiot the narrator is. Maybe I'm being harsh, but if I'd been in Albertine's shoes I would have left him long before she did.
  I have taken to reading this after I get home from work. I deal with some of the more difficult spects of peoples' lives, mostly towards the end. I immerse myself in Proust for a while and forget the tensions of the day. I'm not sure how Proust kept the standard of writing so high, but he has.
  Proust revisits a number of themes throughout and in this volume the narrator in his obsession with Albertine seems to suffer the same sort of separation anxiety he used to feel as a child. His mother at this point is living elsewhere and disapproving of his relationship with Albertine. An interesting switch.
  We get more of the marvellously silly Verdurin's and Baron Charlus continues to delight, but this volume really centres on the narrator and Albertine and whether or not she is having Lesbian affairs. Poor Marcel is bored with her and wants to break things off, obsessed with her, can't make his mind up until she does it for him.
  The problem with reviewing this is I just keep remembering the Monty Python sketch; The All England summarizing Proust contest. If you haven't seen it, look it up; it's nearly as silly as the narrator.
• 
  Roman Clodia

  This edition bundles volumes 5 and 6 together but I'm reviewing them individually below:
  
  Volume 5: The Prisoner
  There's a long (long) literary tradition of male authors writing obsessively about their jealous love for a woman whose elusive nature constantly renews his possessive desire: Catullus' Lesbia poems, Propertius' Cynthia poems, Ovid's deconstructive Corinna poems, Petrarch's sonnets to Laura, Philip Sidney's Astrophil and Stella, Ronsard's Sonnets Pour Hélène... and in each case the unsatisfied desire for the woman is also the impetus and motor which drives his writing: possessing the female beloved would bring an end to the poetic/literary project.
  
  Proust appends this fifth novel to that extended literary tradition with the disingenuous pose that his narrator is unique, but is also slyly looking over his shoulder at us to see if we are noting his literary clues: as the classical Latin and Renaissance precedents are built around the blazoning of the female face and undressed female body, Proust shows us his narrator unclothing Albertine: 'I would open her nightdress. The two high breasts were so round that they seemed not so much integral parts of her body as two fruits that had ripened there' - disintegrating and fragmenting her at the same time, destroying any bodily unity for something more artificial ('two fruits that had ripened there').
  
  The implicit power of the male gaze is determined by the lack of reciprocity in Albertine, foregrounded especially in those scenes where the narrator watches her as she sleeps: 'there are some faces which take on an unaccustomed beauty and majesty the moment they no longer have a gaze' - the more vulnerable and passive Albertine is, the more beautiful she appears in the narrator's eyes.
  
  I think what I'm saying is that this is an especially literarily self-conscious book in the sequence, one which looks backwards at cultural constructions of unfulfilled (masculine) erotic desire as a pre-requisite for (masculine) writing just as the narrator's jagged pursuit of Albertine reflects that of Swann and Odette in book 1. The oscillating between indifference and paranoid jealousy is especially Catullan with its odi et amo vibe. With the final departure of Albertine at the end of the book, will the narrator finally transition into a writer? Or do we have to wait for volume 7?
  
  It's worth saying that this volume in particular is open to all kinds of resistant and feminist counter-readings as the narrator keeps Albertine secretly in his apartments, sets up a network of chaperones and spies to watch her and report back to him, and fantasises about her lesbian encounters while watching her as she sleeps... How worried should we be that so many male-authored love narratives feature a woman with no subjectivity of her own and masculine behaviour that in real life would be considered paranoid, pathological, psychotic even, and stalker-y?
  
  Volume 6: The Fugitive
  The Fugitive is largely a reaction to, and in dialogue with, The Prisoner; a kind of antistrophe to the former section's strophe. It reminded me particularly of Hamlet in the way forward progress is constantly impeded, returning to repetitions of the past that create moments of stasis and paralysis before starting to crawl forward again.
  
  Intimations that were suggested formerly become acknowledged now: that the 'prisoner' is also the narrator caught in the coils of neurotic obsession; just as he is also the 'fugitive' fleeing from the burdens of his paranoid love and the memories that pursue him; even from his former conceptions of self and reality that shaped his understandings of how to be in the world.
  
  Importantly, the previous instabilities of personality and self are now brought into the open:

  It was not Albertine alone who was only a succession of moments, it was also myself [...] I was not a single man, but the march-past of a composite army manned, depending on the time of day, by passionate, indifferent or jealous men' (p.456).

  This revelation leads the narrator to finally recognise the extent of his subjective, contingent understandings that have been represented previously as facts:

  'the egoism of love causes us to love people whose intellectual and moral features are the least objectively defined for us, we readjust them endlessly according to our desires and our fears, we cannot separate them from ourselves, they are no more than a vast and vague terrain where we externalize our affection' (p.461-2).

  Albertine, he realises, has been no more than a self-constructed mirror of his own desires and he is now brought to realise the solipsism of his (of all?) desire - and the book that will spring from it.
  
  The volume ends with a flurry of plot revelations but there's the sense that the real work in the consciousness of the narrator has had its breakthrough moment. Moving on to the final volume, will we finally witness the narrator writing the book that we have been reading?
• 
  E. G.

  --The Captive (In Search of Lost Time Volume V)
  --The Fugitive (In Search of Lost Time Volume VI)
  
  Notes
  Addenda
  Synopsis
• 
  Roy Lotz

  More than a year has intervened between my reading of the last volume and this one; and yet I find that my reaction to Proust has remained constant. Constant, yes, and complicated.
  
  I have this relentless back and forth, tug-of-war reaction to Proust, a mixture of the most intense admiration and absolute disgust. My thinking and writing bear the scar of his influence; it is a scar I wear proudly, but which still stings if I poke at it. Whenever I read Proust, I feel so irritated and sometimes so dreadfully bored—a palpable and suffocating boredom—that I want to tear my hair out by the roots; and when I finish I have the mad desire to yell vulgarities at the top of my lungs, both as a celebration and a way to vent pent up anger. But I keep coming back, I keep rolling the rock patiently up the hill, and I keep watching it tumble back down.
  
  I have had difficulty identifying why I’ve had this reaction. In previous reviews I’ve attributed it to Proust’s Cartesianism: his entrapment in his own ego, his relentless subjectivity. But the fact that this book is so deeply rooted in the first-person does not adequately explain the Proustian effect. There are plenty of autobiographies and memoirs that do not produce this same sensation of being trapped in the writer’s head and buried alive by their cogitations. No, it is not the subjectivism alone. Although you wouldn’t guess it from Proust’s elegant, smoothly drifting prose, or his perpetually calm narrative voice, the upshot of his reams of analysis is not only Cartesian, but deeply cynical. This passage perhaps sums up the cynicism better than any other.
  

  The bonds between ourselves and another person exist only in our minds. Memory as it grows fainter loosens them, and notwithstanding the illusion by which we want to be duped and with which, out of love, friendship, politeness, deference, duty, we dupe other people, we exist alone. Man is the creature who cannot escape from himself, who knows other people only in himself, and when he asserts the contrary, he is lying.

  
  For Proust, the essential error of human life is forgetting this inescapable subjectivity. This error is most obvious with love. We think we fall in love with other people; but we really fall in love with creatures of our own fancy. The "person" we love has only an oblique reference to the real person, and is mostly a collection of desires, hopes, fantasies, fears, memories, and other sundry emotions—a jumble of mental propensities only associated, by chance, with a physical being. Indeed, our beloved is not even singular; we have as many beloveds as we have moods. Proust goes even further. His bleak conclusion is that love not only has very little to do with the other person, but that love, far from a tender emotion, is just an expression of sexual jealousy.
  
  In his Cartesian worldview, there is literally no action, however apparently generous and kind, that is not ultimately selfish. That is inevitable, since we can only ever know ourselves, and all our ideas of other people are just veiled ideas of ourselves. And can we even know ourselves?
  
  Time is constantly stripping our identity away. Our thoughts can never stand still, but ceaselessly rush downstream, and the refuse is swept down the drain. We are trapped in our own perspective; and there is no stable point from which to come to grips with that perspective. The mind reacts to this existential instability by imbuing its environment with meaning, and then trying to control it. We fall in love—thus imbuing a specific person with all the magic charm of our thoughts—and then do our best to keep our beloved near us. Sexual jealousy is just this attempt to control the beloved; and love, for Proust, is just the anguished feeling that our beloved, whose presence helps us to define ourselves, whose physical continuity helps to fight our existential angst, might break away. This is why love evaporates for Swann after marriage, and for the Narrator after Albertine’s death; they no longer feel jealous. The tenderness of love and the rage of jealousy are, for Proust, just two symptoms of the same condition.
  
  Without going into tedious argument, I will say that I disagree with this intense subjectivism. If you begin, like Descartes and like Proust, with the ego and then try to build the world back up again, you will find, like Proust, that you can’t and that you’re stuck with your own ego. But far from being the most solitary of animals, humans are the most social; and the very fact that the world doesn’t make sense when you take your solitary ego as the starting point—which Proust’s Narrator continually finds—is why you ought not to. Yes, we see other people through the distorting lens of our own personality—as any mortal creature must—but experience so often shows that we are much better judges of other people than they are of themselves, and even, in a way, we know them better than they know themselves—something impossible in Proust’s world.
  
  This is not to say that there isn’t a great deal of truth in Proust’s perspective. Specifically, I think he is brilliant at showing how our happiness depends on our interpretation of events rather than events themselves. Like any patient historian, he catalogues all the ways that the Narrator interprets, misinterprets, and re-interprets Albertine’s words and actions; and he shows again and again that the Narrator’s emotional state depends exclusively on these interpretations, not on the words or actions themselves. He is happy when he thinks Albertine loves him, desparing when he thinks she is cheating (but did she ever love him, and did she cheat?); and he begins to get over her when he stops defining himself in reference to her.
  
  As you might have guessed, art plays a large role in Proust’s worldview. For it is only through art that we can, just barely, break out of our perspectives and reveal ourselves to others. The phrase from Vinteuil’s sonata is the prime example of this, which reappears in Vinteuil’s septet, transformed, in a different context, with different emotional overtones, and yet unmistakably the same basic phrase of music. This phrase communicated the stamp of Vinteuil’s mind so unmistakably because, being the product of focused and impassioned artistic creation, it carries with it something of the composer’s unchanging soul, an identity impossible to discern using formal analysis but which is immediately recognizable nevertheless. (Proust was, you see, no advocate of the death of the author.)
  
  It is only through this artistic communion that we can transcend, however briefly, the limitations of our perspective: “the harmony of a Wagner, the colour of an Elstir, enable us to know that essential quality of another person’s sensations into which love for another person does not allow us to penetrate.” The reference to love is crucial here, since for Proust love is the false idol that leads most people astray. It is only through art, not love, that we really get to know another person; it is only through art that the boundaries that separate mind from mind are bridged; and this, presumably, is why Proust is writing this in the first place. Here is Proust putting this into his own inimitable words:
  

  … is it not true that those elements—all the residuum of reality which we are obliged to keep to ourselves, which cannot be transmitted in talk, even from friend to friend, from master to disciple, from lover to mistress, that ineffable something which differentiates qualitatively what each of us has felt and what he is obliged to leave behind at the threshold of the phrases in which he can communicate with others only by limiting himself to externals, common to all and of no interest—are brought out by art, the art of a Vinteuil like that of an Elstir, which exteriorises in the colours of the spectrum the intimate composition of those worlds which we call individuals and which, but for art, we should never know? A pair of wings, a different respiratory system, which enabled us to travel through space, would in no way help us, for if we visited Mars or Venus while keeping the same senses, they would clothe everything we could see in the same aspect of things of Earth. The only true voyage, the only bath in the Fountain of Youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to see the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to see the hundred universes that each of them sees, that each of them is; and this we can do with an Elstir, with a Vinteuil; with men like these we really do fly from star to star.

  
  Notice how intense is Proust's subjectivism here. Even if we go visit another planet, he thinks, we really only see ourselves. The exterior world has almost nothing to do with what we observe, think, or feel, and it is only through art, which opens up other perspectives, that we have a window to something new, a temporary escape from ourselves.
  
  At present, I am not sure I agree with Proust about the ability of art to transcend the boundaries that separate consciousness from consciousness; and I certainly do not agree with his cynical views on love, or his subjectivist vision of human life. As a writer of prose, in short bursts I find him extraordinarily eloquent, and in longer sittings I find him soporific and tedious. His books simply wear you out. Proust himself died at 51 while completing the last volume; and his English translator, Scott Moncrieff, died at 40 midway through the same volume. I myself feel as if every page of Proust ages me internally. Time is not only a theme of this book, but an essential aspect of reading it. In The Magic Mountain, Thomas Mann says:
  

  Can one narrate time—time as such, in and of itself? Most certainly not, what a foolish undertaking that would be. The story would go: “Time passed, ran on, flowed in a mighty stream,” and on and on in the same vein. No one with any common sense could call that a narrative.

  
  But Proust comes perilously close to narrating time. His prose never changes pace, never speeds up nor slows down, but slides by like time itself, uniformly moving along, flowing, drifting, with the same mannerisms repeated again and again, the same sorts of observations, the same themes that repeatedly return—a placid voice narrating a story that makes me neither laugh nor cry, only yawn on occasion—and yet, and yet, you cannot make your way through these pages without being transformed, however subtly, in the process. Just as Proust’s Narrator feels as if great artists and musicians allow him to see the world with a hundred eyes, I feel as if I have lived several lives so far; when I put down Proust my bones ache and I feel weary, I feel weak and dizzy as if I were just breathing a thin atmosphere. And yet, and yet, who would change a word, who would alter a line, and who would consider any time spent in these pages to be lost?
• 
  W.D. Clarke

  Jealousy and grief form the twin concerns of v5 (The Captive) and v6 (The Fugitive respectively. For me, what unites such explorations in these two books was the fragility of our inner and outer lives: we grow jealous because we anticipate losing those whom we love and we are beset by never-ending grief because we still cannot really believe that we have lost them (and pace Kundera, forgetting is our sole anodyne). Early on in The Captive (in which Albertine is installed in Marcel's family's apartments so that he can, out of his anxiety that it is some other woman and not himself whom she loves, keep tabs on her), Proust makes the following observation:

  Sweet, gay, innocent moments to all appearance, and yet moments in which there gathers the unsuspected possibility of disaster, which makes the amorous life the most precarious of all, that in which the unpredictable rain of sulphur and brimstone falls after the most radiant moments, whereupon, without having the heart or the will to draw a lesson from our misfortune, we set to work at once to rebuild upon the slopes of the crater from which nothing but catastrophe can emerge. I was as carefree as those who imagine their happiness will last.

  Proust says elsewhere that learning that happiness cannot last is a key lesson to learn, and even claims that if Albertine had not left him he would only have known half of life.
  
  Indeed, the word "half" figures prominently in these two volumes, as people are always half-awake, half-asleep, lips are half-open to receive a lover's kiss, or eyes are half-closed to the half-light that reveals two lovers intertwined against a wall, or girls on the street are "half-human, half-winged creatures, angel or peri" (Persian mythical creatures of ambiguous valence). Perhaps because our human nature can only half-tolerate reality?!

  Each new doubt makes us feel that the limit has been reached, that we cannot cope with it; then we manage to find room for it all the same, and once it is introduced into the fabric of our lives it enters into competition there with so many longings to believe, so many reasons to forget, that we speedily become accustomed to it, and end by ceasing to pay attention to it. It lies there dormant like a half-healed pain, a mere threat of suffering which, the reverse side of desire, a feeling of the same order that has become, like it, the focus of our thoughts, irradiates them from infinite distances with wisps of sadness, as desire irradiates them with unidentifiable pleasures, wherever anything can be associated with the person we love. But the pain revives as soon as a new doubt enters our mind intact; even if we assure ourselves almost at once: “I shall deal with this, there’ll be some way of avoiding suffering, it can’t be true,” nevertheless there has been a first moment in which we suffered as though we believed it. If we had merely limbs, such as legs and arms, life would be endurable. Unfortunately we carry inside us that little organ which we call the heart, which is subject to certain maladies in the course of which it is infinitely impressionable[….]

  Here Proust is not yet even half-way to making his point (I had to end that blockquote somewhere), but the (un)fortunate thing about Proust is that he is almost unparaphrasable, unreviewable. The only way to deal with the book might be to re-read the darn thing, over & over, without end (as a favourite professor of mine did, with both ISOLT and Ulysses on his bedside table, taking turns), taking in each partial truth partially, so that we approach but never arrive at the true heart of things….
  
  We live in parts, but our tyrant, that restless, relentless, sadistic colonizer, love, "is a demand for a whole" that can never be fully met. If we were to ever fully possess the beloved, Proust claims, then love itself would cease:

  "We love only what we do not wholly possess."
  "Here I mean by love reciprocal torture."
  "Amorous curiosity is like the curiosity aroused in us by the names of places; perpetually disappointed, it revives and remains for ever insatiable."

  I put off reviewing this book because there are so many ways to approach it--besides the many bits I underlined on the relations of art (in general, and novels in particular) to life, one other central metaphor is that jealousy is just tyrannical reason's (& its handmaiden in the above quot'n, curiosity) desire to know (& therefore to control) applied to love, for example, and by the end of the sixth volume we learn just how wrong reason can be... But I won't go into all of that--for the sake of brevity, you understand, as Polonius once said before soiling a pristine arras with stuff that "that little organ which we call the heart" traffics in…
  
  Too much! Or not enough…Anyhow, it was somewhere in volume five, after being really, really irritated by the character Marcel's insane jealousy (jealousy and envy are the qualities I least admire in people, and am too slow to tolerate or seek to understand) that a light bulb suddenly went on over my head and I realised that as soon as I finish v7 this December, I will have to go back and start again, like my professor. I'm hooked.
• 
  Yu

  Proust presents a tragicomic vision of, not just love, but all human emotions being tempting, thrilling illusions in the fragments of time. Hovering in the background of this tragicomedy is the questions of 'What induces people to abandon happiness in pursuit of the aestheticism (or in other words sadomasochism)?' and 'How to reveal the hidden drives?'. The protagonist's obsession with Albertine's Lesbianism illustrates the pursuit of these two mysterious questions.
  
  Memory is the key to search for hidden meanings, for the unconscious. Temperaments, motives, emotions are more fully captured and revealed in fragmentary memory traces than in firsthand experience. It is through the illogical monstrousness of memory that we discover what people and things are really like. No author does it better than Proust in bringing out lovingly the tragicomic reality of human feelings, with delays, with impediments, with inconsistency, and with swirls of dreams that turn life into a work of art.
  
  "For there is in this world in which everything wears out, everything perishes, one thing that crumbles into dust, that destroys itself still more completely, leaving behind still fewer traces of itself than Beauty: namely Grief."
• 
  Bettie

  
  
  
  http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0076qrn
  
  Revisiting, via BBC R4x, all the books in remembrance, our world has altered too.
  
  
• 
  Sue

  alternately beautiful and frustrating, as all of Proust seems to be. Gorgeous descriptions, occasionally humorous anecdotes, angst-filled cries from Marcel, followed by heartless thoughts. quite a book.
  Full review to come...
• 
  Lee Klein

  The longest book I've ever read, longer than those with many more pages. I don't mean the complete Search -- I'm referring to this volume, a mere 936 pages that took me forever. If I'm honest with this impression, I should admit that I find Proust sort of stupefying most of the time. I can only read 15 pages at a time without dosing off or reaching for my phone. But every once in a while there's an image or insight that makes it all worthwhile. I mean, the book is regularly studded with the best of things I look for in books, my copy is regularly dogeared, but this installment is dense and nutso. For the most part, Marcel is with Albertine but doesn't want to be with her ("The Captive"), but once she's gone ("The Fugitive") he's obsessed with her again, madly in love, until he learns of her sudden spoiler alert. Most of the musing seems to be about whether Albertine is getting it on with women. The finest section, up there with the description of the grandmother's death, describes Albertine asleep. It's not riveting but it's surely real good and maybe even the best ever. Other bits take off, especially about music and Venice but they're not as clear as the bit about Albertine sleeping. When Proust's prose clarifies an image, be it a little phrase in a concerto, pink hawthorns, an airplane rising into the sky, or his lover asleep, he's the best. For me, when he brings the aristocracy on stage, he doesn't totally falter at all but I fall asleep. Memorable bits in this include asking Andree if he can watch as she gets it on with another woman -- or at least gently caresses a woman's arm. Also, the revelation about M. de Charlus and Odette, and about St. Loup at the end. In general, like in Stendhal's "The Red and the Black," this depicts (more in summary than in scene) the tilt-a-whirl game-playing dynamics of the ending of an intense relationship. The gist is: say or do exactly the opposite of what you really want to say or do -- insincere concealment is essential to successful manipulation of a lover. As a non-reader, I hate that shit so much, but on the page, it's less frustrating/childish, although Marcel is starting to seem more and more to me like a manipulative obsessive sociopath. I mean, he can't seem to look at a young lady without wondering if she's a lesbian. In the end, it seems like he wrote 900+ pages of this volume so he could embed this bit of straightforward editorializing: "Personally, I found it absolutely immaterial from a moral point of view whether one took one's pleasure with a man or woman, and only too natural and human that one should take it where one could find it" (p 934). The violinist signs his letters to male lovers "Bobette" -- similarly I don't think I've ever really totally believed that Albertine (who at one points wants her "pot broken," a euphemism for buggery) is not actually an Albert -- Gilberte is a thinly veiled Gilbert and Andree is really an Andre. Also, Marcel at one point says he'll get the commoner Albertine a yacht and a Rolls Royce -- the class stuff maybe makes me less a full-on lover of this? The prose is fantastic at times, the insight impeccable, but everything's so high-falutin and a bit unbelievable, especially the society stuff. More later -- it's hard to summarize since I've already forgotten so much, which seems like part of the point of Mr. Proust's massive project -- over time Marcel forgets Albertine; I've forgotten the first pages by the time I've reached the end. One more volume to go in the fall, before I read it all again 10 years from now. Also, the bare thigh on the cover of this one has maybe been photoshopped to the point of seeming unhealthily thin?
• 
  Susan

  Having made my way to the end of Volume 6 of, “In Search of Lost Time,” I find myself with only the last book to read. At one time, I felt I was laboriously climbing my way through them and now I feel almost broken hearted that the end is in sight… Such is the way that Proust winds his way, slowly creeping into your life, until I cannot imagine the end of the day without his words lulling me to sleep.
  
  Although it does seem as though most of this work takes part in the head of our narrator, some of the themes would be very at home in a modern novel. For, in these volumes, we find that Albertine has been persuaded to move into our narrator’s home. There are vague promises of marriage, a lot of angst from poor mama and a fair amount of sneering contempt from the faithful Francoise.
  
  You would imagine, after all the plotting and planning and manoeuvring involved to finally establish Albertine at his home, our narrator would be enjoying finally having her there. However, we readers have not come this far to imagine that to be the case. It is not long before he is attempting to control her every movement, delve into every possible behaviour of her past and use, frankly, every trick in the book to try to convince himself that she is not to be trusted; while veering wildly between utter devotion and totally despair.
  
  In a sense, it is almost pointless to talk about what happens within the pages of these books. The joy is in inhabiting this world and of realising how much insight Proust had into the lives and hearts of his characters – both good and bad. I am about to embark on the last volume with both a sense of achievement and a sense of loss.
  
• 
  Mala

  
  
  The frocks that I bought for her, the yacht of which I had spoken to her, the wrappers from Fortuny’s, all these things having in this obedience on Albertine’s part not their recompense but their complement, appeared to me now as so many privileges that I was enjoying; for the duties and expenditure of a master are part of his dominion, and define it, prove it, fully as much as his rights. And these rights which she recognised in me were precisely what gave my expenditure its true character: I had a woman of my own, who, at the first word that I sent to her unexpectedly, made my messenger telephone humbly that she was coming, that she was allowing herself to be brought home immediately. I was more of a master than I had supposed. More of a master, in other words more of a slave.
  
  A continuation of themes from Sodom and Gomorrah,but more obsessive,more paranoid & bewildering – an intellectual s & m of sorts where the captor himself becomes the captive. Love was never an easy game.If Proust's intention was to make the readers experience the claustrophobia of Marcel-Albertine relationship; he has greatly succeeded.
  
  Three strands of thought stand out:
  
  Albertine has lost her mystique,hence Marcel is bored. She is a captive; there's no longer a sense of conquest.
  
  Suddenly,some hint of a rendezvous,some hidden agenda,& Marcel's jealousy rears its ugly head- Albertine must be safeguarded like a prized jewel- the wooing starts all over again.
  
  Peace re-established,Marcel again loses interest in her & starts moping abt his lost opportunities with other girls,the demands on his time & attention which keeps him away from his artistic pursuits & so on:"(Albertine is) a treasure in exchange for which I had forfeited my freedom, my solitude, my thought.”
  
  Now can you really blame Albertine for wanting to have some fun on the side?
  
  Marcel is able to carry Albertine back to Paris & keep her under his watch but peace of mind remains forever elusive: only a sleeping Albertine,in her vegetative state can afford him some sense of possession:"when Albertine was asleep, she seemed to have recovered her innocence.(...) she looked as though she were trusting herself to me! Her face had lost any expression of cunning or vulgarity, and between herself and me, towards whom she was raising her arm, upon whom her hand was resting, there seemed to be an absolute surrender, an indissoluble attachment. Her sleep moreover did not separate her from me and allowed her to rétain her consciousness of our affection; its effect was rather to abolish everything else."
  
  
  Marcel flip-flops between boredom & pangs of jealousy– possession denies one the thrill of the chase & causes boredom- the love object has no more mystery attached to it- why then he keeps torturing himself? It's cause Albertine's supposed hidden life keeps him on tenterhooks- "To these people, these fugitives,their own nature, our anxiety fastens wings. And even when they are in our company the look in their eyes seems to warn us that they are about to take flight. The proof of this beauty, surpassing the beauty added by the wings, is that very often the same person is, in our eyes, alternately wingless and winged. Afraid of losing her, we forget all the others."
  
  A new knowledge of his failed affair with Gilberte broadens the focus of this jealousy- a hurt to his self-esteem that she was two-timing him with the full awareness of people in their circle- this kind of jealousy goes beyond pathological,people cheating on us while enjoying our largesse- who wouldn't be hurt by that? He further adds the musical weight of Wagner's leitmotifs to his arguements- jealous memories return to haunt the lover just like recurring musical themes so Marcel's behaviour is natural!
  
  Besides,the more influential aspect is that he is getting used to their domestic arrangement- Albertine has come to mean more than a part-time lover:"It was no longer the peace of my mother’s kiss at Combray that I felt when I was with Albertine on these evenings, but, on the contrary, the anguish of those on which my mother scarcely bade me good night, or even did not come up at all to my room,(...)as though all my sentiments which trembled at the thought of my not being able to keep Albertine by my bedside, at once as a mistress, a sister, a daughter; as a mother too, of whose regular good-night kiss I was beginning again to feel the childish need, had begun to coalesce, to unify in the premature evening of my life which seemed fated to be as short as a day in winter."
  
  Marcel's jealousy is thus very complex- it goes all the way back to a child's insecurity who wanted the comfort & possession of his mother,a less than robust health & a host of other life experiences that leave him vulnerable & cynical by turns- faced with this enigma,Albertine's response is equally complex- outward subservience & inner resistance- Marcel can never reach her core; her mind.
  
  In a way,in Albertine,Marcel finds his Anima, his female side embodied in a sexually ambiguous girl who,likewise,remains equally prone to boredom & keen on variety of experiences.( In the present times,Marcel would get an apoplectic fit if Albertine took him to see this
  movie! ).
  
  The second section didn't bring any relief either as my favourite character M.de Charlus got his comeuppance. I was reading an interview of Justice Stephen Breyer in NYRB titled 'On Reading Proust',& while his observations hold true for all the volumes in this series,in this particular case involving Charlus,this truth really hits home:
  "It’s all there in Proust—all mankind! Not only all the different character types, but also every emotion, every imaginable situation. Proust is a universal author: he can touch anyone, for different reasons;(...) What is most extraordinary about Proust is his ability to capture the subtlest nuances of human emotions, the slightest variations of the mind and the soul. To me, Proust is the Shakespeare of the inner world."
  
  M.de Charlus,usually known for his dramatic grandstanding,is seen faltering for words when hit below the belt by the frenemies,the Verdurins.
  It might sound harsh but both Marcel,& Charlus needed the lessons that they were taught in this volume-i.e.never to underestimate the seemingly weaker side. The ending,loaded with irony,thus came as befitting!
  
  It's pertinent to observe that one by one, the mentors in Marcel's life are passing away– first his grandmother,then Swann,& now Bergotte- time is slipping by & if Marcel wants his "little patch of yellow wall"- his View of Delft,he must focus on his creative life. The Vinteuil themed musical evening at the Verdurins,serves as a repeated reminder of this.It's through Art that Marcel will find his salvation,his raison d'être:
  
  "(A future)promise and proof that there existed something other, realisable no doubt by art, than the nullity that I had found in all my pleasures and in love itself, and that if my life seemed to me so empty, at least there were still regions unexplored.”
  
  In this relentlessly morbid narrative,there are moments of pure joy– the early morning music of the street vendors of Paris captures a slice of time,and Marcel's discourse on parallelism in art,music & literature is a treat- a guy who "talks like a book"!
  Next time someone brings up Dostoyevsky; I'm going to quote Proust!
  
  Quotes: as usual the most difficult thing in a Proust read is deciding which quotes to select & which ones to omit! Here are a few for your delectation:
  
  On love,jealousy,& power equations!
  
  "Love, what is it but space and time rendered perceptible by the heart.”
  "we love only that in which we pursue something inaccessible, we love only what we do not possess."
  
  "After a certain age, from self-esteem and from sagacity, it is to the things which we most desire that we pretend to attach no importance.(...)the true wisdom — forces us speedily enough to this genius for duplicity. All that I had dreamed, as a boy, to be the sweetest thing in love, what had seemed to me to be the very essence of love, was to pour out freely, before the feet of her whom I loved, my affection, my gratitude for her kindness, my longing for a perpetual life together. But I had become only too well aware, from my own experience and from that of my friends, that the expression of such sentiments is far from being contagious. Once we have observed this, we no longer ‘let ourself go'.”
  
  "The proper thing to do would be to take the opposite course, to shew without arrogance that we have generous feelings, instead of taking such pains to hide them. And it would be easy if we were able never to hate, to love all the time. For then we should be so glad to say only the things that can make other people happy, melt their hearts, make them love us.”
  
  "having no damning evidence to produce, and to recover my ascendancy, I hurriedly turned to a subject which would enable me to put Albertine to rout."
  
  “Jealousy is often only an uneasy need to be tyrannical, applied to matters of love. I had doubtless inherited from my father this abrupt, arbitrary desire to threaten the people whom I loved best in the hopes with which they were lulling themselves with a security that I determined to expose to them as false.”
  
  "The unknown element in the lives of other people is like that in nature, which each fresh scientific discovery merely reduces, but does not abolish. A jealous lover exasperates the woman with whom he is in love by depriving her of a thousand unimportant pleasures, but those pleasures which are the keystone of her life she conceals in a place where, in the moments in which he thinks that he is shewing the most intelligent perspicacity and third parties are keeping him most closely informed, he never dreams of looking."
  
  Swann gets his tribute.
  "Swann on the contrary was a remarkable personality, in both the intellectual and the artistic worlds; and even although he had ‘produced’ nothing, still he had a chance of surviving a little longer. And yet, my dear Charles ——-, whom I used to know when I was still so young and you were nearing your grave, it is because he whom you must have regarded as a little fool has made you the hero of one of his volumes that people are beginning to speak of you again and that your name will perhaps live."
  
  Artistic life for greater authenticity:
  "when I had myself longed to become an artist. In definitely abandoning that ambition, had I forfeited something real? Could life console me for the loss of art, was there in art a more profound reality, in which our true personality finds an expression that is not afforded it by the activities of life? Every great artist seems indeed so different from all the rest, and gives us so strongly that sensation of individuality for which we seek in vain in our everyday existence”
  
  "The only true voyage of discovery, the only fountain of Eternal Youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to behold the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to behold the hundred universes that each of them beholds, that each of them is; and this we can contrive with an Elstir, with a Vinteuil; with men like these we do really fly from star to star.”
• 
  Matthew Ted

  49th book of 2022.
  
  So, I have a single volume of Proust's novel left. Volumes 5 & 6 centre almost entirely around Albertine and Marcel's relationship, and there is a large plot point that I can't discuss without spoiling it. That said, a lot of reviews for these volumes spoil the big event so if you don't want it spoilt, avoid reviews, especially since many of them do not have the spoiler tag. I, somehow, didn't see any of the spoilers and so the big happening surprised me. Obviously, time/memory continues to be the biggest theme of these volumes but I've been surprised in the last few volumes how often grief comes up too. I guess grief is intrinsically linked to time: whenever I think of grief I think of the old cliche, time heals. Maybe it's true. I was coming back from work the other day in my mate's car and I asked him if it still hurts him to think of his mother whom he lost at 12-years-old. He told me, Not really, no. Of course, he still thinks about her, but it isn't a sadness anymore, per se. If anything, he said, since she died, I just cry at films more easily. He has two young girls and any Disney film ending, he said, makes him cry. With grief there is the obsessive attempts to remember the person who is gone, and with that we circle back around to memory and the act of remembrance [of things past]. The only grief I've dealt with is losing my grandparents many years ago and when I lost them I remember feeling, above any kind of sadness, the weird sensation that they were indeed gone and if I failed to remember them, it would be as if they were never there. Proust explores all of this. I've heard the final volume is the giant philosophical crescendo, the insight into why he wrote this novel, what it all means, and how it all holds together as one giant arc and achievement.
  
  Vol. 5
  placeholder review.
  Vol. 6
  placeholder review.
• 
  Felek

  My favorite volumes so far!
• 
  Brenda

  I've only just finished The Captive, I didn't realize this title held both volumes, so I will have to update this.
  
  The Captive - Volume 5
  I admit, I had to read this volume twice. The first time I was not sold at all, gritted my teeth throughout, hated it more than not and just wished for it to end. The 2nd time I appreciated Marcel for the frail, young, sickly man he was. Finding love, but feeling all the pangs of love. Jealousy. Happiness. Excitement. Desire. But also, knowing your limits and wrangling how this affects the both of you.
  
  Volume 5 is beautiful, haunting, touching, and also exasperating at times. We see the lovers dance. We wonder who is the Captive? We see the ironies of love, of life, of the differences and disparities between our hearts and our heads.
  
  Besides, Marcel, we also have the society Madams and Mssrs, and the hypocrisy that usually fills the salons, more than anything.
  
  In the end, I'm happy to have spent the time to read it twice, so I was able to appreciate it. And I did. I feel this volume and Marcel's telling us of his feelings and his vacillating, also mirrors a lot how I as a reader feel with his work. How the love is so strong, but also sometimes stifling, and sometimes you feel it's too much and you need to be done with it, and then the moment comes at the end and you're horrified because it's been done to you. Did you really wish for it?
  
  The Fugitive - Volume 6 :
  Volume 6 is now finished. What an irony. After spending 3/4 of the book in despair, and emotional distress, one letter brings all the reality home and the light goes on for Marcel. I do like how the end of the novel brings back some of our earlier characters.
• 
  poncho

  "For my taste, Proust explains much: 300 pages just to make us understand that X screws Y is way too much."
  — Louis-Ferdinand Céline. Letter for Milton Hindus.

  
  
  Well, you better get ready for 700 pages on sexuality, dinner parties, jealousy, memory, art and beauty. Though for my taste, those ‘over-explained’ pages are one of the several things I like so much about Proust’s work. I actually got to know about that quote from a film:
  Laurence Anyways by Xavier Dolan; and, even though I don’t agree with it, I found it funny. The quote is originally in french and I translated it myself — yes, sorry. But let’s move on to the concerning volumes.
  
  
  The prisoner.
  
  This volume is just so full of rage, fear, sadness, sexuality, frustration, comedy… It’s the ‘dark side’ of human nature in a nutshell (maybe it'd be more of a coconut than a nutshell). I feel like Sodom and Gomorrah was just the introduction for a deeper analysis on homosexiality, or rather on sexuality as a whole. André Gide said that Proust ‘portrayed only the grotesque and abject aspects of Sodom.’ Well, yes, I agree that homosexuality, unlike in a Proustian world where it represents a majority and a common thing, in the real world it implicates so much dejection and suffering, characteristics which in In search of lost time are left for the narrator, who is a frustrated heterosexual trying to deal with his jealousy for a person whom he doesn’t know how to please. However, it’s important to take into consideration that to talk about homosexiality, covering it all, would take more than a seven-volume work of literature. Can someone write and fully describe heterosexuality? Of course not, and so it happens with its inverse, for they are not as simple as that. Yes, most of the (very, very, very long) paragraphs depict homosexuality in a comical way; but not even laughter can last forever and we get some glimpses of outcast people. In Proust's favor, I'd say that while everyone saw aversion he saw inversion. Like he himself wrote in The prisoner:
  
  

  "The closer one becomes to human beings and their existences, the more one is convinced that ready-made labels and classifications are too simple."
  — Marcel Proust. The prisoner.

  
  
  So one might think that Proust only wrote about homosexuality’s hilarious parts, but if we analyse it, there’s a Charlus being Morel’s ‘sugar daddy’, while the latter is just using him to make a career out of the former; there’s an Albertine, captive with someone who is obsessed with her, but who shall never understand her true feelings; and finally, we must not forget that Proust was a gay man himself, so if he depicted himself through the narrator, that means he might have suffered similar sorrows. Besides, from the moment he refers to his own sexuality as an inversion he’s trying to make it look poetic (or at least that’s how I see it).
  
  

  “It is the homosexuality that survives in spite of obstacles, condemned, covered in shame, that is the real homosexuality.”
  — Marcel Proust. The prisoner.

  
  
  I found this particular volume so full of a variety of emotions: we got Charlus’s dispute with Mme Verdurin, resembling those battles on The Iliad, representing these two some gods, using the trojans (the parisians in this case) to try to show their (social) powers; we got Albertine’s «se faire casser le pot»; and last, but no least, we got the narrator’s realtionship with Albertine, based on obsession, jealousy, frustration and fear.
  
  It was funny, though, to read Albertine's now famous expression because I had recently heard it, translated literarily into spanish. So that made me wonder whether such an expression had survived ever since and been imported directly from France to Mexico, or whether human wit goes overseas and has no bounds so people in Mexico saw too the relationship between a pot and that particular part of the body — I myself don’t see it, but I think it’s somehow funny; or maybe Proust is very well-known — okay, I doubt that too.
  
  Even though this volume might the funniest of the previous four, I must confess that, at the same time, it really got me: I could see myself in the narrator having been in a similar situation of frustration on the unknown, on being unable to please the person you love. It doesn’t matter how hard we try to restrain a person, for the fear for they to escape and our obsession are simply enough to make us an even more powerless prisoner than the person we are holding back, depriving ourselves from the things we enjoy the most. But I did understand Albertine too, being unable to express herself, to be her true self; and I don’t think she’s to blame for the way things turned out, but neither is the narrator, for they’re just trying desperately to fit in somewhere they just won’t since they don’t have the means to do it — perhaps Albertine does, but that would mean to make a captive of herself. Besides, her life was a little bit sad and sorrowful, always being a tourist in other people’s lives. That made me think how lonely a treasure’s life can be.
  
  So here it is, my review for The prisoner; I wrote it after I finished it, so there's still The fugitive left to be read. Let’s see what else I can add, or whether some impressions can change…
  
  
  The fugitive.
  
  (Sigh…) I’m having a hard time trying to review this volume with no spoilers, for it’s got a particular event from which the story will concentrate now on. However, while I was reading it it seemed to me as though time had stopped, as though there was a gap… no, not a gap, for that would mean discontinuity, but a pause in the story. It felt as though I was sitting by the narrator while he told me about his grievances. Time here is like a savage animal caged, on hold, waiting for its release until finally, in chapter 4, it is unleashed, but since it's so excited for being caged, it doesn't know where to go so he moves and bounces everywhere. The same thing happens here: first you are reading a lineal story that suddenly moves from a very long future to a very long past and back to present and so on and so on.
  
  Proust’s prose, for my taste, is outstanding and exquisite in every single volume of his masterpiece, but I think there’s something special in The fugitive, something that makes it more fluid, as a flow of thoughts: simple yet so beautiful. Or maybe it was just the mood I was in when I read it — who knows. But what I can tell you for sure is that through Proust I’ve learned to read my own thoughts and to appreciate the beauty in everything: a single word, a single flower; like he said, the humblest things. When one reads him, he lends you his inner eye to see the world through his own point of view and that's magnificent.
  
  To return to the story, it is very important to pay attention to the
  conversation between Albertine and the narrator after the latter comes back from the Verdurins' taking place in The prisoner, for both volumes, also known as Le roman d’Albertine (Albertine’s novel), are going to focus on this particular conversation: from its very words to the expressions, from what it seems to be to what it really is. It’s Andrée who later reveals all of this and if you think carefully about it, you can see how Albertine’s desperation and use for her famous ‘pot’ expression comes out of an urge of freedom, of her desire to be left alone, not being able to sacrifice her nature anymore for someone who might hate her (as Andrée said). Yes, according to her friend, Albertine thought that by marrying a non-invert person, she might stopped being one herself; but that is just as impossible as when people think someone becomes gay just by hanging out with gay people; maybe personalities can change, but sexuality is not something you acquire, it is something you are born with.
  
  

  "I think that with you she had overcome her passions and kept postponing the day when she would yield again."
  — Marcel Proust. The fugitive.

  
  
  If you think Charlus's (a.k.a. sugar daddy) relationship with Morel was a little bit twisted because of the latter, just wait and read for whom he dumps the former (hint: it's a relative). This same relative turns out to be quite different that you may have thought. Poor narrator, living in a world where heterosexuality is off the radar. And like this fact, so many things begin to unravel, announcing an end to this odyssey.
  
  I'll be almost a year since I began with Swann's way and I still remember how excited I was and I'm still so excited about being so close to the end, but sad at the sime time. This has been a totally worth reading and I think I am going to reread it someday (maybe not so soon, but someday). Who knows, this might be for me what Mme de Sévigné's letters were to the narrator's grandmother, right?
• 
  David Lentz

  Modern Library's Volume V deals with the relationship between Marcel and Albertine. It is a complex, psychological relationship to say the least. In the Captive, Albertine lives with Marcel in his apartment in Paris and in The Fugitive one wonders who is, in fact, more captive -- Albertine or Marcel. It would seem to be Albertine for whom Marcel possesses an obsessive love and concurrent fear of her sapphic penchant. But it is also Marcel who will sacrifice experience if he makes a commitment to her. Who is more free, the captive or the fugitive? Proust raises questions about how to serve best the artist's quest for beauty. In fact, how does one really ever "capture" the beauty of life in art or music or literature? Even in a masterpiece, is it not beauty the fugitive that usually dwells just beyond one's capture? Or like Vinteuil's septet or the music of Wagner or the painting of Rembrandt, is the best for which one can hope of fugitive beauty only a brief fleeting experience? Are the vast tracts of time spent to understand the beauty and meaning of life worth it? As a writer does he not habitually surrender life in order to capture it? Or is the pursuit of the capture of the beauty of life in fact where one realizes its most sublime value? One sees in Proust toward the end of The Fugitive a member of society who respects it but chooses by reasons of health not to position himself so visibly within it. Despite his family name and vast but dwindling fortune inherited from his beloved grandmother, he seems to become somewhat ultimately disenchanted with the intricacies of Faubourg-St. Germain society to which he devotes so much of his writing. He recognises society's shallow obsession with materialism and rampant snobbery but his own place in society is captured by its complex history and tacit rules and Marcel is inescapably a captive of his own culture. When Albertine is lost to him toward the end of the volume, as in the prior volumes, the story line's serial intrigue advances most. Characters from prior volumes reappear, reminiscent of Balzac, whom Proust adored, but like him they change,too, and usually for the worse over time. The great tapestry of the characters of Proust -- Albertine, Gilberte, Swann, Brichot, Bloch, Charlus, Morel, Saint-Loup -- ultimately surprise and usually disappoint him. As to nagging questions about Proust's own orientation, "Personally I found it absolutely immaterial from a moral standpoint whether one took one's pleasure with a man or a woman, and only too natural and human that one should take it where one could find it." I found myself wishing that Proust had written more about Bloch and Saint-Loup and Gilberte, and less about Albertine. But she was, like his work, the one obsession, the endeavor of which understanding he could never escape and never quite marry -- she was his beauty and his art. She was the breath of life itself from his pen and from his experience of life as seen through the eyes of a true genius.
• 
  Inderjit Sanghera

  ‘The Prisoner and the Fugitive’ is the exploration of the narrator’s obsessive and passionate relationship with Albertine; it is a deliberate echo of the love affair between Charles Swann and Odette de Crecy, in fact all of the relationships explored in ‘In Search of Lost Time’ echo each other, from Charlus and Morel to Saint-Loup and Rachel, the theme of lesbianism, obsessive love and of sensitive and cultured characters falling in love with vulgar and vapid individuals, left dizzy via the vertiginous vortex of love. Yet the narrator, unlike the other characters, is able to transform his pain and experiences into art, so that his love affair is merely a coalescment of all other love affairs and heart-breaks and he is fulfilling the artist’s vocation (without yet knowing it) of transmuting life into art.
  
  The novel begins with a wonderful description of waking up; “I could tell from the first street noises, whether they reached me muffled and distorted by dampness or twanging like arrows in the empty, resonant space of a wide-open morning, icy and pure. The rumbling of the first tram told me whether it was huddled against the rain or forging gaily towards a blue horizon.” The narrator is beginning to discover, isolated alone in his room, that the raw materials for his art are all around him, it is via his sensory exploration of the world around him that he will come to an understanding of life and just as the sonorous rumbling of a tram will bring back the memory of the rain, so the sunshine streaming through the narrator’s windows in the morning will rouse him out of his somnolence and bring back Albertine’s carefree and chincanrous whistling; “The sun suddenly turned this net of glass to yellow, gilded it and, gently uncovering in me a young man of former times who had been long hidden by habit, intoxicated me with memories, as if I had been in the open air looking at gilded foliage in which not even the presence of a bird was wanting.”
  
  And so the narrator soars and glides, like the most intrepid of birds, over the characters and places which inhabit his novel-no writer has delved as deeply into the quiddity of things as Proust, has opened the reader’s eyes to the untrammeled beauty of the world like Proust is able to, from the sight of rain-dampened roof tiles; “when the roofs, briefly dampened by rain, then dried by a brief wind or a ray of sunshine, poutingly displayed a few drops, as they wait for the wind to turn again, preen in the passing sunshine the rainbow glint of their shot-silk slates…” to the description of the Duchesse de Guermantes’s dress; “I let myself be swept away into the atmosphere it created, like that of certain late afternoons muffled in a pearl-grey floating mist. If, on the other hand, the chosen gown were Chinese with a pattern of red and yellow flames, I saw it as a brilliant sunset; these costumes were not a trivial decoration which could have been replaced by any other, but an inescapable reality, poetic in the same way as the weather, or the light peculiar to a certain time of day.”
  
  Proust’s super-sensory appreciation of the world, for all of its irrevocable wonders and irretrievable beauties of life was part of his own aesthetic guidelines. Proust felt truly original and great art was not to describe things as they are, but describing them as they have never been described for, hence the impressionistic vignettes with populate his novel, no other writer was able to imbue their characters with as much depth or as many facets as Proust. The central story within the novel, is the love story between the narrator and Albertine. The merits of Proust’s ideas on love aside, his exploration of his obsessive and disturbing relationship with Albertine, from the descriptions of her sleeping to real and imagined subterfuges he thinks she is guilty of, few writers explore the nature of love with as much depth and honesty as Proust does. For Proust falling in love was in reality just another form of falling in love with oneself, the soul of another person would always be unattainable and mystery to us, so it is our attempt to penetrate the barriers placed between us which causes us to fall in love, especially if we aim for something we can never possess-for Proust desire was centered in knowing we would never be able to obtain what we desired, or if we ever obtained what we wanted, being aware that there was a part of the other person which was forever mysterious and impenetrable, such as Albertine’s potential sapphic desires.
  
  Yet, for Proust heartache and pain were central to the artist’s development; without it they would never have a complete view of the world and life. Proust is able to get over the shock of Albertine’s departure and death by visiting Venice; “Suddenly at the end of one of these little streets, a crystalline matter seemed to have produced a swelling. A vast, sumptuous campo of a size that I certainly could not have guessed, let alone found room for in this network of little streets, stretched out before my eyes, surrounded by enchanted places, in the pale light of the moon.” Unlike Balbec, or his visit to watch La Berma perform, Venice is able to live up to the narrator’s fantasies; this isn’t because of the intrinsic worth or beauty of Venice, but rather the narrator’s life experiences, joys and heartbreaks are able to mature him, to blur the line between reality and fantasy and make him realise that there is much beauty in his impressions of the world around him as the fantasies he creates; in fact, true art is a combination of the both.
  
  “Venice, whose everyday reality was no less real than that of Combray and where it was a pleasure, as in Combray, to go down into the festive streets on Sunday mornings, but a street which was a whole stretch of liquid sapphire, cooled by soft breezes and so deep-dyed that my tired eyes could relax and look steadily at it with no fear that it might fade.”
  
• 
  BAM the enigma

  Oh I just figured out I only have two books left!
• 
  Elena Sala

  THE CAPTIVE (1923) and THE FUGITIVE (1925) are included in the Modern Library volume.
  
  In THE CAPTIVE, the narrator is living with Albertine. Thanks to his munificence, Albertine is becoming a woman of fashion. The narrator muses (endlessly, I must confess) about their history together, her complex character, and most of all, he confesses he is tormented by Albertine's faithfulness. He wants to know at any cost what she is thinking and whom she is seeing.
  
  In THE FUGITIVE we learn that Albertine has packed her bags and fled, while Marcel is still asleep. Alternating waves of relief and despair wash over him until he learns he has lost her forever (to avoid spoilers I will say no more about this). His life is thrown once more into upheaval and he becomes even more desperate to know who Albertine really was and what she meant for him. More than 100 pages are dedicated to an exhausting and exhaustive description of Marcel's grief.
  
  Fortunately, Marcel and his mother manage to make his long-delayed pilgrimage to Venice, and on the trip back home they receive the surprising news that Gilberte Swann, the young girl who fascinated the narrator so much when he was a boy, unexpectedly marries Robert St. Loup (the narrator's great friend)— who, oh surprise, will soon be revealed to be a homosexual.
  
  THE FUGITIVE was published after Proust died, so he was not able to revise it. There are some glaring inconsistencies in this part and it really is an endless, repetitive book. Some serious editing is sadly missing. Now I must tackle the final volume!
• 
  Ben

  15 April 2014
  
  "Days in the past cover up little by little those that preceded them and are themselves buried beneath those that follow them. But each past day has remained deposited in us, as in a vast library where, even of the oldest books, there is a copy which doubtless nobody will ever ask to see."
  
  How much I have thought of this passage lately, with old memories slowly creeping up from my subconscious as I continue my journey with Marcel Proust. I have of late been through many walks down long neglected pathways in my own mind, triggered not by a madeleine, but by some seemingly trivial thing. And the objects (or subjects) that set my own journey through mind into motion have been given more consideration than they have received from me in the past, thanks to this work.
  
  I believe that I made a comparison in my review of Swann's Way (if my memory is a reliable judge) between that work and Djuna Barnes' Nightwood, which was published almost a quarter of a century after the first in Proust's seven volume classic was initially printed. Not only did Barnes' style remind me at times of Proust, with a certain poetic sensibility (I think T.S. Eliot was right in stating that Barnes' masterwork would "appeal primarily to readers of poetry," and I think that the same could well apply to Proust's writings), but she dealt with similar themes, such as homosexuality and musings on phenomena such as nobility and titles and the fluidity of social class distinctions at the turn of the century.
  
  Now I have reached a point in my journey with Proust where I have come to his posthumously published works, and there are some inconsistencies, many which would have escaped my attention had it not been for the notes section at the end of this edition. But these "inconsistencies" (a bit more obvious in The Fugitive than The Captive) in no way diminish for me the delight that is In Search of Lost Time. And I am, as stated in my review of Sodom and Gomorrah, very much in awe of how the pieces first laid on the table in Swann's Way, all fit together like a jigsaw puzzle.
  
  While I do wish that I had written a separate review of each of these two works, both because I feel they deserve separate reviews and because I had so many thoughts seeking escape from my mind at the time I finished The Captive, thoughts which I kept "captive" as it were rather than allowing them the freedom they perhaps needed (and which may be now lost somewhere in time), but here is an attempt to both resurrect those musings that I had at the time I finished The Captive and organize for the first time my thoughts on The Fugitive.
  
  First, as to The Captive, it is obvious on the surface that Albertine is the captive of our jealous little narrator, and it becomes apparent as the narrative unfolds that the narrator is a captive, too, largely due to the way his jealousy has controlled his life; but also int the sense that his relationship with Albertine shuts him off from other experiences. But really all of the characters are captives in their own ways: the Verdurins and the members of their "faithful" little clan, Charlus and Morel, and so many others, with certain figures emerging as more power-hungry than others -- the treacherous Mme Verdurin, Charlus and our narrator friend (oftentimes referred to as "Marcel").
  
  This work contained for me some of the most probing insights on the subject of jealousy that I had ever encountered, and certainly one of the most interesting accounts of homosexuality that has ever crossed my path in literature (certainly since reading Djuna Barnes), turning from Charlus' appreciation for the male sex in Sodom and Gomorrah, to Albertine's inclinations toward the way of Sappho in this work. In fact, as the work progresses (into The Fugitive) it seems as if everyone is inclined to homosexuality except for our narrator (perhaps Proust's attempt to better -- not unlike his Charlus -- conceal his own "inversion").
  
  Throughout this work, so many of the characters suffer -- some through the interference of others (Albertine perhaps, and certainly Charlus at the hands of Mme. Verdurin) and others (at least partly) through their own will (most notably our narrator): "Suffering when we are in love ceases from time to time, but only to resume in a different form." And it is often painful to watch, partly because at this point we (or at least I) feel so invested in the characters' lives as they unfold on the page, and partly because so many of us may have encountered, not in exactly the same way, similar experiences to those Proust shows us: we have either been jealous (and thus sympathize with he who wants to possess another, or else realize how irrational is this jealousy, which in a way consumes one's being) or have been in a relationship with a jealous partner. And either way, we know what it feels like to be a captive, and perhaps even a captor.
  
  Whereas Proust writes at one time about Dostoevsky, "In Dostoievsky I find the deepest wells of insight but only into certain isolated regions of the human soul. But he is a great creator," the same could very well be applied to him. He shows us glimpses of the dark corners of the soul that we prefer to ignore, but he (like Dostoevsky) shines a light on these corners and makes us see. Freud did the same (and one would think in reading Proust that he, like other writers of his generation was -- to borrow a line of F. Scott Fitzgerald -- "hep on Freud," but Proust allegedly never read Freud, and was perhaps not even well-acquainted with Freud's groundbreaking ideas). I remember reading Civilization and Its Discontents and wanting so much to deny Freud's claim that humans were naturally predisposed towards violence and aggression, because I wanted to believe that we (and I, especially) were better than that. But even if we learn to control impulses toward physical violence, we nonetheless act sadistically (intentionally or not), through jealousy or betrayal, or some other mechanism, trying to protect our egos and shelter ourselves from harm (or maximize our pleasure).
  
  Shifting into a discussion of The Fugitive I found myself all the more befuddled by the claim that Proust never encountered Freud, for not only do many of his thoughts on homosexuality run parallel to those of the great Austrian theorist, so do his writings on dreams (which Freud laid out in 1900 in his classic -- though somewhat dry and repetitive -- work, The Interpretation of Dreams), particularly in the section "Grieving and Forgetting," wherein Proust dedicates a good deal of space to the discussion of "those transient periods of madness."
  
  In this work, too, I was particularly carried away when Proust pondered on the art of the novel -- "for certain novels are like great but temporary bereavements, abolishing habit, bringing us back into contact with the reality of life" -- and the craft of writing, just as I have previously been dazzled by his discussions of music (such an important thing in the whole of this seven-volume classic).
  
  I think that any who has come this far along on the journey that Proust has guided us, it would be a travesty not to continue onto the last leg of the trip and read Time Regained. I had begun reading the The Captive as part of a three volume collection, the last of which included The Captive, The Fugitive and Time Regained. But less than halfway through the first work, the binding on the book started coming undone and I was left with a lap full of dried glue and pages, long captive, seeking to become fugitives from the book itself. Dozens of pages would fall out the more that I read. I soon grew rather frustrated and bought the Modern Library edition of The Captive & The Fugitive displayed in the avatar for this book.
  
  [In the meantime, in preparation for an upcoming move, figuring I would locate Time Regained before finishing The Fugitive, I packed up that deteriorating book (I couldn't just abandon it). And now, despite weeks of searches, visiting every bookstore in the city, I have not been able to track down a copy of Time Regained. I have just accepted the fact that I will have to purchase a copy online, and it is until that order is placed and then arrives that I must take a leave from my remarkable journey thus far with M. Proust. In the meantime, perhaps I will revisit that other great French writer of whom Proust was so fond and often references, Balzac].
  
  **********
  11 March 2017
  
  I amended the above review slightly. This being my second voyage through the world of Proust, I have read and reviewed Time Regained and greatly anticipate rereading it very soon; this time I will have no difficulties tracking down a copy, for I have it shelved in my home.
  
  On this second trip into the bedroom of Marcel and Albertine, into the Verdurin salon, and then onto Venice, one thing that caught my attention was the frequency of the terms "perspicacious" and "perspicacity." Some scholars have made a great hubbub about the frequency of the word "wander" in Milton's Paradise Lost (which I recently finished reading) and it could be said that it is only natural for the word "wander" to appear multiple times over the course of 300 pages. While I lost track of how many times the words perspicacity and perspicacious were used in The Captive and The Fugitive they did appear with great frequency and I could not help but think how much more perspicacious our narrator has become since we first encountered him in his boyhood in Swann's Way. It should be expected that most people will gain insight into the workings of the world as they advance in years, but by the time we get to The Fugitive I feel that the narrator (immature as he often is at times in his intense jealousy, his refusal to say what he really wants, the distress he causes his mother when he refuses to leave Venice with her, etc.) seems to have grown considerably as a person and as an artist, particularly in that he has come to understand that there is not just one way of looking at the world.
  
  In the early volumes of In Search of Lost Time, he looks to others for assurance on what to read, how to read, on whether or not his impressions of Berma or of a piece of music are as they should be. And perhaps he was on the path of developing his "taste," tastes that were appropriate to his class and the historical period in which he was living. But by the end of The Fugitive especially, he has come to understand that there are many ways of reading, many ways of interpreting art, literature and the world:
  
  Certain philosophers assert that the external world does not exist, and that it is within ourselves that we develop our lives. . . .
  
  [When reading his own article in the Figaro] Although I was well aware that many people who read this article would find it detestable, at the moment of reading it the meaning that each word conveyed to me seemed to me to be printed on the paper, and I could not believe that every other reader on opening his eyes would not see directly the images that I saw, assuming . . . that the author's thought is directly perceived by the reader, whereas quite other thoughts form in the latter's mind. . . .
  
  It was into a new personality that I was tending to change altogether. It is not because other people are dead that our affection for them fades; it is because we ourselves are dying. . . .
  
  . . . how difficult it is to know the truth in this world. . . .
  
  I feel that early on the narrator -- as do most children (and many adults for that matter) -- was seeking out Truth with a capital 'T', was assured that there was one way to the perceive the world and make sense of it all. The theatre was to be appreciated in a particular way; readers were to respect the same things and the same works -- were his impressions of Berma, Bergotte, Elstir correct? Was his way of seeing the world the right way of seeing it?
  
  But as he grows, as he suffers, as he realizes more and more that reality is often very different from his expectations he seems to be increasingly aware of the fact that there are many truths; many ways of seeing the world, shaped by our experiences, by our social class, by tradition and habit. His perspicacity is not like the "idle perspicacity of M. and Mme de Guermantes," but rather a deeper, more complicated understanding of the social world and the life of the artist. The experiences of so many years, detailed in the course of the previous five volumes of this work, have given birth to the young artist (similar in a very general sense to trajectory of the lad in Joyce's Portrait of the Artist). And his philosophy of memory and his impressions of life hit a new apex in Time Regained, which I eagerly look forward to start rereading in the weeks ahead.
• 
  Sajid

  “We exist only by virtue of what we possess, we possess only what is really present to us, and many of our memories, our moods, our ideas sail away on a voyage of their own until they are lost to sight! Then we can no longer take them into account in the total which is our personality. But they know of secret paths by which to return to us.”
  
  Again stupefied i am by the mastery of Marcel Proust! My love for his writing is just increasing day by day—In search of Lost time giving me always a time that i can never lose. The sheer of joy of reading and finishing one volume after another exceeds any kind of joy can have in social gathering. And such is the nature and power of Prost's writing—by showing you the apparent gorgeous but snobbish nature of bourgeoisie social gathering, he invites you to return again and again to that precious place,which is your own being. Again and again he invites you to the solituded of an artist, to make you realise that even the most conflicted and distracted a person can give birth to the most beautiful thing—a work of art. That is Proust for you,whose Nietzschen vocation always tells you—don't let things get heavy on you,rather break and mould them so that they can become a work of art. Moreover, make your life a work of art!
  
  Here, in this volume, unlike any other we literally and completely get into the psyche of the narrator. More than half of the novel is spent on the psychological drama of the narrator. Regarding his love for Albertine, his jealous--which got the better of him--he reflects on everything regarding his experience with Albertine. And underneath this envelope we can see Proust making it clear to the reader his philosophical contemplation. Which is that of memory and time. We know that in Proust the role of memory and time reappears every now and then. So just like other volumes,here too he elaborates on the quantum nature of memories and the vertical nature of time. He intertwined these with the notion of self. How a human being is never an uniform totality of experience, but so many fragmented selves,images,mirrors. As if we are different person everytime memory and time play a game with us--a game of dice. As Deleuze puts it nicely “we are so many larval selves”. Besides, apart from the narrator we also get to know some brutal truth about other characters as well,which shocks us of course.
  
  Every page i found beautiful, Proust's prose never disappoint. But some of lines i can still feeling whirling like some shiny dust in my mind. Among them those opening lines are favourite as well. Here it goes beautifully :
  
  “At daybreak, my face still turned to the wall, and before I had seen above the big window-curtains what shade of colour the first streaks of light assumed, I could already tell what the weather was like. The first sounds from the street had told me, according to whether they came to my ears deadened and distorted by the moisture of the atmosphere or quivering like arrows in the resonant, empty expanses of a spacious, frosty, pure morning; as soon as I heard the rumble of the first tramcar, I could tell whether it was sodden with rain or setting forth into the blue.”
• 
  Jim Coughenour

  I've been reading Proust on and off for 30 years. I've read Swann's Way at least three times in its entirety; and its immediate successors a couple times each. Every time I've been stopped by The Prisoner (or The Captive in the Moncrieff/Kilmartin edition) and The Fugitive, but I finally made it through.
  
  For me the problem has always been that Marcel's obsessive love for Albertine stretched credulity: the voice and sensibility of the narrator is so plainly that of a man who loves men, not women. This incongruity is one that lovers of Proust simply have to accept, and move on. It's worth the effort.
  
  Reading Proust is a journey. There's no need to hurry – and like Montaigne and Shakespeare, Proust just gets richer with each reading. I've been making my way through the Penguin Proust since it appeared in 2002, enjoying the new translations. I also keep the classic Moncrieff translation at hand so I can switch back and forth. Moncrieff has been long criticized for making Proust more flowery than he actually is, but his version, as amended by Terence Kilmartin, holds up very well.
  
  
  
• 
  Chris Via

  Video for The Captive:
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lnopI...
  Video for The Fugitive:
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKfiH...
• 
  Tara

  
  

  "…in Vermeer’s View of Delft, a little patch of yellow wall was so well painted that it was, if one looked at it by itself, like some priceless specimen of Chinese art, of a beauty that was sufficient in itself …[Bergotte] fixed his gaze on the precious little patch of wall. 'That’s how I ought to have written,' he said. 'My last books are too dry, I ought to have gone over them with a few layers of colour, made my language precious in itself, like this little patch of yellow wall.'"

  
  The fifth and sixth installments of In Search of Lost Time are just gorgeous. Proust continues to explore, in that obscenely exquisite way of his, such subjects as music, literature, psychology, memory, identity, “the revolving searchlights of jealousy,” and the beautifully tangled complexities of our relationships with one another. I’m including some of his more breathtaking observations below, as Proust speaks far better for himself than any mere mortal ever could:
  

  “…in exploring one sector of the vast zone that extended round me, I had succeeded only in pushing back still further that unknowable thing which, when we seek to form a definite idea of it, another person’s life invariably is to us.”
  
  “And yet it did not occur to me that I ought long ago to have ceased to see Albertine, for she had entered, for me, upon that lamentable period in which a person, scattered in space and time, is no longer a woman but a series of events on which we can throw no light, a series of insoluble problems, a sea which, like Xerxes, we scourge with rods in an absurd attempt to punish it for what it has engulfed.”
  
  “As a man who at first has had no serious reason for losing his temper becomes completely intoxicated by the sound of his own voice and lets himself be carried away by a fury engendered not by his grievance but by his anger itself as it steadily grows, so I was sliding faster and faster down the slope of my wretchedness, towards an ever more profound despair, with the inertia of a man who feels the cold grip him, makes no effort to struggle against it, and even finds a sort of pleasure in shivering.”
  
  ”In Dostoievsky there’s concentrated, still tense and peevish, a great deal of what was to blossom later in Tolstoy. There’s that proleptic gloom of the primitives which the disciples will brighten and dispel.”
  
  “…the country dining-room which I could reach in no time, and the smells that I would find there on my arrival, the smell of the bowl of cherries and apricots, the smell of cider, the smell of gruyère cheese, held in suspense in the luminous coagulation of shadow which they delicately vein like the heart of an agate, while the knife-rests of prismatic glass scatter rainbows athwart the room or paint the oilcloth here and there with peacock-eyes.”
  
  “And these moments of the past do not remain still; they retain in our memory the motion which drew them towards the future—towards a future which has itself become the past—drawing us along in their train.”

  
  I am so in awe of what this man was able to achieve.