Category: Proust

“The faithful” of the “little clan,” as the regulars at the Verdurins’ Wednesday-evening salon are known, have shifted a bit over the years since Odette and Swann were part of the group, and even those that are familiar faces from Swann’s Way may have changed a bit..but not too much. Dr. Cottard is no longer…

To pick up where I left off, in the middle of Part Two: “The Intermittencies of the Heart” is sad and sweet and lovely. In this section, our narrator arrives at Balbec and suddenly, a year after the fact, the sorrow and loss of his grandmother’s death are real to him, start affecting him in…

In the past I’ve only written here when I’ve finished reading something, but Proust is such slow going, and there is so much I want to write about, and this volume is so different from one section to the next. So here goes. Part One: Sodom and Gomorrah is, as you might guess, gay gay…

A central concern of this volume is the gap between what a name conveys to us and what the person who bears that name is really like: how the meanings of a name change from one time of our lives to another, and how all those successive meanings may hold little or none of the…

I’ve been reading Within a Budding Grove slowly over the past few months, in ten-page snippets on the train, sprawled on the floor, stretched out in bed. What I like best in Proust are the lyrical passages, the images, full sentences like this one: I encountered no one at first but a footman who after…

I’ve been reading Swann’s Way slowly over the past month, enjoying Proust’s slow circling sentences (the kind you have to read twice because by the end you’ve lost track of where it started), enjoying the digressions, the flashes of humor in the dialogue, and enjoying, of course, all those sense-images (lilac trees, tisane, the light…