About this title: This self-contained opening volume of Proust's seven-volume masterpiece REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS PAST introduces the important themes of the novel: childhood, memory, love both idealized and unrequited, and the narrator's fascination with society and the aristocracy. The narrator's childhood memories include the famous madeleine scene, and the destructive love affair between Swann and Odette. The musician Vinteuil's evocative "little phrase" is introduced in this volume, which also describes Marcel's awareness of "the two ways," the paths that intersect the village of Combray where he lives: the ...
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Note: This is a general synopsis. Each listing is described below.
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Heritage Press, New York
Date Published: 1954
Description: Very good in very good dust jacket. Very Good, In very good dust jacket. xii, 441 p.; [31] leaves of plates: ill.; 29 cm. Translation of Du côté de chez Swann. read more
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Modern Library College Editions
Date Published: 1956
Description: Good. ---611 pgs. Interior-Nice overall condition. The soft cover has light signs of aging. -Publish Place: New York-Size: 12mo-over 6¾"-7¾" tall. read more
Description: Fair. B000J6BUAY Binding square and tight, with spine creasing. Considerable shelf and edge wear includes top corner creases, side edge wear and various creases (mostly hairline), and various rubbed and soiled spots. Top front cover corner and first six pages have curl forward. Pages clean and unmarked with age-tanning. Good reading copy. Satisfaction guaranteed. Ships Immediately from CA. 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
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
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
Description: Fair. [ No Hassle 30 Day Returns ] [ Underlining/Highlighting: SOME ] [ Writing: NONE ] [ Torn pages: NO ] [ Broken Seams: NO ] Publisher: Random House/Modern Library Pub Date: 1/1/1956 Binding: Paperback Pages: 550. read more
Description: Octavo, softcover, in white pictorial wraps. 325 pages Pages browned, tear on endpaper, stain on outer pages, but still a good reading copy. read more
Edition: Unabridged.
Binding: Trade paperback
Publisher: Random House
Date Published: 1970
ISBN-13:9780394705941ISBN:0394705947
Description: Good. No dust jacket as issued. inside front cover price in marker. Text in English, French. Trade paperback (US). Vintage book. part of random house read more
"Something about Marcel, the narrator of Swann's Way, reminds me of Michael Jackson. Maybe it's because, (since he just recently died of mysterious, drug induced causes), wherever I go I'm hearing Rockin' Robin or Ben or Billy Jean and I'm applying a Michael Jackson spin to everything in life or maybe even if Michael Jackson had not died, but was in fact still preparing for his "This is It" come back tour throughout Europe and beyond - perhaps I would still get this vague thought of MJ while I read of Marcel, suffering from insomnia, crying for his mom's kiss or knew that Proust himself was sleeping in his cork-lined room waiting for dark so he could get up and write. Well I don't mean he's sleeping there now - but I just got so used to the shifting of tenses that I'm carrying on with the technique in my review.
There is a lot of meandering and reminiscing going on and sometimes I just can't stay with the man. Sometimes I stop and take a look at some lilac or lily pad he's just pointed out and I realize he's kept going and I have no idea what the heck he said or saw or remembered. And then, bam, he'll make some sort of dead-on observation that is true to the quick and seems like it should be in a book listing things universal to all. I'm talking about something like this:
Because she had no education and was afraid of making mistakes in grammar, she deliberately pronounced things in a garbled way, thinking that if she made a blunder it would be fogged over by such indefiniteness that no one would be able to make it out with any certainty, so that her conversation was reduced to an indistinct hawking, from which emerged now and then the few vocables of which she felt confident. Proust is stream of consciousness writing at its finest. But what he is conscious of is taking walks and going to salons with the pseudo artsy crowd of Paris and that can often get downright tiresome. But I must say that after reading Swann's Way I feel somewhat more complete. I didn't realize I had a piece missing, but I think it surely must have been. I already am feeling much more in the loop of things - and who would have thought that reading Proust would place one in the loop? But I am only on page 74 of my next book, The Elegance of the Hedgehog and there have already been four references to Proust which I understood! If I had read these books in reverse order I would have been heading down the Guermantes way under threat of a thunderstorm with my iPod blaring "Don't Stop Til You Get Enough", missing all the details."
"I've had a few false starts with this book over the last year or so, but this time something clicked. I love it, and I'm starting to appreciate why Proust is so highly regarded. This is more than a novel - it's a work of philosophy, of psychology, of artistic criticism, of musical appreciation, all synthesised into a seamless whole.
One of my favourite experiences when reading is to come across a phrase or a description or a character that immediately strikes a chord, either because it reminds me of something in my own life, or because it illustrates something more universal in a new way. With Swann's Way I found this happening constantly - how did Proust manage that?"
"Good story about ego quality; suppose it benefits to rationalize man is not a being totally alone but his friends are somewhere in this world. Clandestine writer writing presage passages so firm and kindled likable persons take some personal flight or fanciful envy themselves to characteristically truly love this book. I swung under many gloomy passages and for a time long enough to just rationalize how important it is to come and know the family and his situation that are extremely comical and many in variation. There is a two way road. So meaningful for the composition. Not at all alienable like following undisguised his little line for a remark to be chosen. I liked this book. Very enjoyable once I finally finished. And knowing so much more. And really left solely inspired. I'm sure I'm not alone. Ah! It great knowing there is more to the series. I'm reading the C.K. Scott Moncrieff translations. My favorite part of Swann's Way is when Marcel Proust shows Swann as another man even for a person of great society. And implies Swann dines with royalty and keeps this knowledge to himself because of instead making it remotely public. And Marcel Proust made Swann out as a giftedly smart and great man with a meaning and logic as well as humored. There is enough intelligence for hints of hidden adventure in the brooding temper of Swann too and makes him seem to come alive. This is more all at the latter end of the book and after reading so much about the families interested in Swann.
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He would enter the drawing-room; and there, while Mme. Verdurin, pointing to the roses which he had sent her that morning, said "I am furious with you !" and sent him to the place kept for him, by the side of Odette, the pianist would play to them-for their two selves, and for no one else-that little phrase by Vinteuil which was, so to speak, the national anthem of their love. He began, always, with a sustained tremolo from the violin part, which, for several bars, was unaccompanied, and filled all the foreground; until suddenly it seemed to be drawn aside, and-just as in those interiors by Pieter de Hooch, where the subject is set back a long way through the narrow framework of a half- opened door-infinitely remote, in colour quite different, velvety with the radiance of some intervening light, the little phrase appeared, dancing, pastoral, interpolated, episodic, belonging to another world. It passed, with simple and immortal movements, scattering on every side the bounties of its grace, smiling ineffably still; but Swann thought that he could now discern in it some disenchantment. It seemed to be aware how vain, how hollow was the happiness to which it shewed the way. In its airy grace there was, indeed, something definitely achieved, and complete in itself, like the mood of philosophic detachment which follows an outburst of vain regret. But little did that matter to him; he looked upon the sonata less in its own light-as what it might express, had, in fact, expressed to a certain musician, ignorant that any Swann or Odette, anywhere in the world, existed, when he composed it, and would express to all those who should hear it played in centuries to come-than as a pledge, a token of his love, which made even the Verdurins and their little pianist think of Odette and, at the same time, of himself- which bound her to him by a lasting tie; and at that point he had (whimsically entreated by Odette) abandoned the idea of getting some 'professional' to play over to him the whole sonata, of which he still knew no more than this one passage. "Why do you want the rest ?" she had asked him, "Our little bit; that's all we need." He went farther agonised by the reflection, at the moment when it passed by him, so near and yet so infinitely remote, that, while it was addressed to their ears, it knew them not, he would regret, almost, that it had a meaning of its own, an intrinsic and unalterable beauty, foreign to themselves, just as in the jewels given to us, or even in the letters written to us by a woman with whom we are in love, we find fault with the 'water of a stone, or with the words of a sentence because they are not fashioned exclusively from the spirit of a fleeting intimacy and of a 'lass unparallel'd.'"
"Let me state first that to each volume, and the novel as a whole I give emphatic FIVE STARS, but within the novel there were certain volumes that I found more stirring (and I believe this to be an intentional effect of the novel; volumes 3 & 4 deal more with Marcel's experience in society, an experience that quells his artistic drive, and this suppression is manifested in the text, those volumes being relatively superficial, not so full of that artistic reverie, less often reaching those same heights of tenderness and melancholy), so the four-star ratings for the middle volumes are simply to represent those subtle shifts. That being said...
I was nervous about reading "In Search of Lost Time; intimidated by its reputation as a notoriously difficult book. I am glad that I did dive into it; my only fear now, with one volume left to read, is that it will soon be over (even having read each volume twice, I don't think I will be able to wait too long for round three)! I knew not what Proust held in store, I have found nothing but pleasant and profound surprises. Personally, I find the book's infamous difficulty ill-deserved. Proust's sentence structure can be rather drawn-out, meandering even; but, first of all, the attentive reader should not find this too much trouble; and second, it is absolutely necessary to the novel, a novel which is in large part concerned with the frenetic functioning of the mind, the mind's natural free-associations and wanderings. The book also seems to be ridiculed for its slow pace; well if one simply follows the the movement of the characters, the plot, this might be a valid claim; I, however, don't much care for "page-turners," they are so titled for a reason--they are shallow, simply story and little else. The technical virtuosity, the style, and the depth of human insight on just about every page of Proust offer me a greater thrill than any plot movement ever could.
In Search has everything: rich, vivid, original descriptions (take, in Swann's Way, M.'s hawthorns; his treatment of the Vinteul sonata; the paths leading to Meseglise & the Guermantes; the madeleine, of course; and so much more); sublime and sometimes painfully acute insights into, and expression of the human experience of joy, sorrow, love, jealousy, and everything in between; some of the most enjoyable and dimensional characters I have encountered; technical novelty (Proust's complex comparisons, his hybrid metaphor/similes are first rate)... it is not possible to capture it all here; it must simply be experienced."
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