About this title: In CITIES OF THE PLAIN (also known as SODOM AND GOMORRAH), Marcel continues his forays into the aristocratic society into which he has finally been admitted, finding satisfaction but a growing disillusionment as well, and is both fascinated and repelled by the world of the flamboyant homosexual Baron de Charlus, and reports on the intricate, ...
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Description: Good. Shows some signs of wear, and may have some markings on the inside. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! read more
Edition: 1st Ed(AsSuch) 1st Printing
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Modern Library/Random House, New York, NY
Date Published: 1999
ISBN-13:9780375753107ISBN:0375753109
Description: Fine- 747pgs Trade Size Paperback. Rear cover, several pages before slightly rolled at bottom fore-edge corner, o.w. clean, bright & Tight. No ink names, tears, chips, foxing etc. This is the C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin Translation. Revised by D. J. Enright. ISBN 0375753109. read more
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Modern Library
Date Published: 1999
ISBN-13:9780375753107ISBN:0375753109
Description: New. Brand New! Buy with confidence-your satisfaction is guaranteed at B-Logistics! Due to the large scale of our operation, we do not have access to the specific contents/condition of our items. Please note that Expedited shipping is not available at this time. read more
Description: Good. Shows some signs of wear, and may have some markings on the inside. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! read more
Binding: Softcover
Publisher: Modern Library
Date Published: 1999-03-01
ISBN-13:9780375753107ISBN:0375753109
Description: NEW. Softcover. From an inventory that is 100% brand-new, 100% direct from the publishers' distribution channel. We carry NO pre-owned, NO remaindered. We pack in CARDBOARD to ensure the pristine quality is maintained. (Bubble-wrap alone is NOT sufficient to protect from USPS equipment. ) Guaranteed brand-NEW, protected with CARDBOARD, your satisfaction is guaranteed. BKLUVID: 9780375753107. read more
Binding: Softcover
Publisher: Penguin Classics
Date Published: 2005-10-25
ISBN-13:9780143039310ISBN:0143039318
Description: NEW. Softcover. From an inventory that is 100% brand-new, 100% direct from the publishers' distribution channel. We carry NO pre-owned, NO remaindered. We pack in CARDBOARD to ensure the pristine quality is maintained. (Bubble-wrap alone is NOT sufficient to protect from USPS equipment. ) Guaranteed brand-NEW, protected with CARDBOARD, your satisfaction is guaranteed. BKLUVID: 9780143039310. read more
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Penguin Classics
Date Published: 2005
ISBN-13:9780143039310ISBN:0143039318
Description: New. Brand New! Buy with confidence-your satisfaction is guaranteed at B-Logistics! Due to the large scale of our operation, we do not have access to the specific contents/condition of our items. Please note that Expedited shipping is not available at this time. read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Viking Adult
Date Published: 2004-09-23
ISBN-13:9780670033485ISBN:0670033480
Description: Like New. May be shiny, in some instances dust jackets are not included, no missing pages, no damage to binding, may have a remainder mark. read more
Binding: Trade paperback
Publisher: Modern Library
Date Published: 1999
ISBN-13:9780375753107ISBN:0375753109
Description: New. No dust jacket as issued. new & unread. Text in English, French. Trade paperback (US). Glued binding. 784 p. Modern Library (Paperback), 4. Audience: General/trade. read more
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Random House Inc
Date Published: 1999
ISBN-13:9780375753107ISBN:0375753109
Description: "Sodom and Gomorrah" opens a new phase of "In Search of Lost Time. " While watching the pollination of the Duchess de Guer-mantes's orchid, the narrator secretly observes a sexual encounter between two men. "Flower and plant have no conscious will, " S... read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Viking Books, New York
Date Published: 2004
ISBN-13:9780670033485ISBN:0670033480
Description: Mark Melnik Jacket Designer. New in new dust jacket. Brand new & unread in Brand new Dustjacket. Glued binding. Paper over boards. With dust jacket. 557 p. Audience: General/trade. Marcel continues his forays into the aristocratic society into which he has finally been admitted, finding satisfaction but a growing disillusionment as well, and is both fascinated and repelled by the world of the flamboyant homosexual Baron de Charlus. read more
"I adapted my review partially from my posting on the Proust Project group.
Proust is sometimes like those directors who do continuous takes with deep focus and tots of slow motion contemplation of the scenery. Sometimes it gets stifling, the number of overlays, like he is following the advice of Titian: "glazes? oh forty or fifty."
But Proust is Proust. Anyway, I just finished S&M. You _need_ to read to the end of the volume, to the last sentence, which is critical and sets up the next volume (I think). Only say 1100 pages to go!
Proust being Proust he uses a scale of time and detail that is more in keeping with the pace of real life--which has its tedious aspects--but that scale seems to make the transitions of the characters seem natural even though he exaggerates their abruptness, a little.
Proustian characters seem to agonize over their obsessions and then go in a diametrically opposite direction than they intended, or that we expect; and this seems to be a theme, that of opposites of mood and character sometimes partaking of an underlying emotional synthesis, so that they are in some sense more alike than other characteristics that are less dissimilar. OK I hope you get that, it was a bit convoluted, but I couldn't quite say it in a simpler way. (That seems to be M. Proust's excuse anyway.)
Anyway, having gotten to this point, I would say that one of the major themes is progressive layers of enchantment and obsession, followed by disappointment, disenchantment and grief. And this relies on the reader's familiarity (at least at the skimming level) with what has gone before.
Each involves an enfolding and unfolding, as each progression of the narrator's tale, and the life process of many of the central characters mirror this, seems to be saturated by, and receive its depth from, all that has gone before.
SEMI SPOILER (I leave a lot out) An example of the multiply threaded connections that are layered through the book, I note that between the little phrase of Swan's leitmotiv of his involvement with Odette and its composer's sorrow and his daughter's posthumous betrayal of his memory, and the narrator's memory of his grandmother, his questioning if he has betrayed her or his memoery of her, the transofmation of his mother into his grandmother by her aging and the parallel dependencies and kindnesses, and the narrator's bivalent feelings for the pretty obviously bisexual pretty Albertine and his terror of confirmation of her lesbian relationships."
"I am finally figuring Goodread out after signing up month ago....this is volume 4 (of 6) of Penguin's new translation of Proust's In Search of Lost Time (formerly better known under the old translation as Remembrance of Things Past). Here--and I am just starting--we see the theme of homosexuality finally rise to the fore of the book, although it's been a more subdued narrative force since the start of the cycle. The opening sections show the craven Baron de Charlus in an afternoon delight with Jupien, all while the salacious Marcl watches on...."
Volume IV was good for me. It started off with a bang (ha, ha), and his absorption with how gays and lesbians fit into society got a little old, but on the whole I liked his forays into society better than at the end of Vol. III. Maybe I'm developing a tolerance for the dinner parties. Or maybe I'm beginning to see the forest for the trees.
It was fun to see our hero in some new/old contexts -- like when he FINALLY meets the Verdurins and is so excited to be at their villa that Cottard says he should try sedatives and knitting. Gotta love the Verdurins -- you're either on the bus or off the bus. (Actually, they annoy me to no end. But I guess I have a better time laughing at them and their little clan than the Guermantes gang.) Now I appreciate the whole Odette/Swann back-story even more. His treatment of Swann's death as a comic device, like he did its approach in Vol. III, is so interesting -- like when the Duchess says his imminent death is no excuse for her deigning to meet his family.
Now he's earned all of those pages at the beginning of Vol. I bemoaning his mom's absence at bedtime -- now that they've translated into more (young) adult obsessions. (Hmmm -- while making my daughter fall asleep without me in the room, am I fomenting neuroses?)
I LOVED how he directly addressed the reader regarding how we get annoyed by his tangents. The tone was perfect. And then he addresses us a second time in understanding that a sane reader would question his chasing of phantom women. I can't wait for more, as Pamela has alluded.
I continue to appreciate his treatment of his grandmother's death -- how he only truly realizes she is permanently gone well after the fact, and how that reality only exists in his thoughts that are stimulated by involuntary (madeline) experiences. And how that nature of reality makes our souls fictitious because our memory is involuntary (wow, is that true for me). But I really like that he has hope that we can recapture the past through a voluntary sensitivity toward sensation not dulled by habit that allows us to experience multiplicity, especially in a familiar environment. (Is he being that optimistic, or is it just me?) He's helping me train my memory, which I believe is his aim. Which is a blessing and a curse, being as I have lived in the same city for 20 years. Thank goodness I've moved out of my house of 19 years, or the ghosts wouldn't let me be!
The references to modernization are fun -- the first time he has a car and driver at his disposal, the first time he sees an airplane and starts crying because both he and the pilot seem to realize that they have so many possibilities for direction that only habit prohibits....
He so nails the melancholy of growing up. How being given the "too great" responsibility to decide his own happiness and not obey his parents' orders (even though he's a fickle neurotic) make him suddenly realize that he only has one life "at his disposal," and he's living it.
And beneath all of that cynicism, is he really a romantic? Loving the "invisible deity" in someone else? Huh.
"Good-bye, I've barely said a word to you, but it's always like that at parties -- we never really see each other, we never say the things we should like to; in fact it's the same everywhere in this life. Let's hope that when we are dead things will be better arranged. At any rate we shan't always be having to put on low-cut dresses. And yet one never knows. We may perhaps have to display our bones and worms on great occasions. Why not?'
As soon as I finished, I ran over to my bookcase and pulled out Vol. V and read the first two pages. But I'm going to be a good girl and read my book club book first. But I can already tell I'm going to give it short shrift. Man, nothing compares to Proust!"
"Continua a saga do jovem narrador e os seus progressos na sociedade da época. Neste romance há menos reflexões e mais descrições de festas, salões e jantares, o que nos dá uma clara imagem das pessoas mundanas: o contraste entre a nobreza e a burguesia, a desesperada tentativa dos novos-ricos em ser aceites pela aristocracia e a futilidade de todos. O tema mais recorrente é o da homossexualidade, o que não é de estranhar dado o título do livro. Aconselho vivamente."
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