Book notes

Category: Proust

  • Finishing The Fugitive, and taking a break from Proust

    I just finished The Fugitive, and it was good, and I am glad to be done with it. The “Sojourn in Venice” section was of course really pleasing, water and light and history and beauty and art, a brief boring digression on politics/diplomacy aside. There’s a surprise telegram (with an added twist) that makes our…

  • More in The Fugitive: “Mademoiselle de Forcheville”

    The “Mademoiselle de Forcheville” section of The Fugitive starts out funny, which is refreshing: our narrator’s doing his usual thing of walking around looking at girls, he sees a group of three and tries to follow them but fails when they get in a carriage. But then, joy of joys, he sees them leaving his…

  • The first part of The Fugitive

    With Albertine gone, our narrator immediately starts thinking of how to get her back: in contrast to the inaction of The Captive it feels like he’s suddenly all action, though really he’s still all talk: he decides he’ll marry her, but writes telling her how good it is that they’ve parted; he sends Saint-Loup to…

  • Finishing The Captive, moving on to The Fugitive

    The rest of The Captive has been pleasing (though slow) reading. I last posted a quote from page 160-something; between there and the end there is: Albertine’s trip to the theatre cut short by the narrator’s jealousy, an afternoon carriage ride, Albertine’s visit to the Verdurins forestalled by the narrator’s jealousy, the narrator’s own visit…

  • The Captive: the “litanies of small trades”

    Despite my initial ambivalence toward The Captive—picking it up then putting it down, picking it up and reading but feeling like it was going to be a tedious and claustrophobia-inducing recitation of jealousies— I’m now really enjoying it, and have been since around page 100. Part of this might have just been me getting back…

  • More in The Captive: Gazing out of Windows

    Besides jealousy, what’s at the center of The Captive is immobility—perhaps not surprisingly, given the volume’s title. At the very start of the book we learn that the narrator spends most of his time in his bedroom, so that’s where we mostly are, too. Sometimes it’s claustrophobic (as is that squirm-inducing jealousy I wrote about…

  • More in The Captive

    Despite that early beauty, this book is shaping up to be sort of squirm-inducing: at the center of The Captive, even more than in previous volumes, is the narrator’s jealousy. It isn’t absolute—or, at least, he says it isn’t—but it’s consuming. It’s the in-between-ness that’s the problem, the hazy awareness, the knowing-but-not-knowing: “I should not…

  • Returning to The Captive

    After just about a three-month-long break, I’ve picked up The Captive & The Fugitive again. I’m in Georgia on vacation right now, which means that my reading time is quiet time in the mornings or the evenings, not commuting time, which I think bodes well for getting farther along in this book than I did…

  • Proust, again: The Captive

    After a several-month break from Proust, I’ve started reading The Captive and am reading slowly,—even more slowly than I usually read Proust, now that I am bicycling to work a few days a week and therefore don’t have 35 minutes of reading-on-the-train time built in at the start and end of my day. I will…

  • The rest of Sodom and Gomorrah

    The rest of Sodom and Gomorrah, after the long middle section, carries on swimmingly: it’s that usual Proustian mix of beautiful observed detail plus funny observed society-life plus jealousy and falling in and out of love and acting more or less foolish about it. There is much about sleep and time and memory and habit:…