Book Review: In Search of Lost Time - Marcel Proust

A friend mentioned that they were going to a Proust book club where they'd be discussing Swann's Way, the first volume of the masterpiece. "Well," I thought, "That sounds like a fun challenge!"

It was not.

I picked up the Standard eBooks version translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff and started my journey.

It starts with a young man having a wet dream and then, in excruciating detail, describing the process of waking up. The writing starts as dreamy but quickly becomes obtuse. The story (such as it is) has a recursive quality which never quite resolves into anything coherent.

Once, at a conference, I casually asked an attendee how he'd travelled to the venue. I was subsequently trapped in a twenty-minute monologue where I was told every last detail of which train he'd taken, where the seat cover fabric was manufactured, who designed the ticketing software, and how the person next to him chewed too loudly. He was just about to tell me about the flavour of crisp the passenger had, when I decided to feign a nosebleed and ran away.

Proust's narrator feels like what would once have been called an "Idiot Savant". He has an eidetic memory and isn't afraid to bludgeon the reader with it.

There are faint hints in the text that the narrator’s family consider him to be a mooncalf.

“That is not the way to make him strong and active,” she would say sadly, “especially this little man, who needs all the strength and character that he can get.”

Obviously, you can't go around diagnosing fictional characters based on TikTok stereotypes. And yet…

I would arrange them in the order of their talent in lists which I used to murmur to myself all day long.

The narrator is either totally unaware of social norms or wilfully blind to them. Having caught his Uncle "entertaining an actress" he is sworn to secrecy. Whereupon:

I found it simpler to let [my parents] have a full account, omitting no detail, of the visit I had paid that afternoon. In doing this I had no thought of causing my uncle any unpleasantness.

He's an unsympathetic character with no self-awareness and a propensity to tell endless tales with no point, no moral, and of no consequence.

I will (begrudgingly) admit that I did laugh a couple of times. Notably:

I became at once a man, and did what all we grown men do when face to face with suffering and injustice; I preferred not to see them.

And

So we at least thought; as for my uncle, his fatal readiness to pay pretty widows (who had perhaps never been married) and countesses (whose high-sounding titles were probably no more than noms de guerre)

Bit it is thin gruel.

I got a quarter of the way though before realising that I wasn't reading. I was running my eyes over the words and hoping to find something - anything - of interest in there.

I ended, more-or-less, at this fine passage:

I had recognised it as a book which had been well spoken of, in my hearing, by the schoolmaster or the schoolfriend who, at that particular time, seemed to me to be entrusted with the secret of Truth and Beauty, things half-felt by me, half-incomprehensible, the full understanding of which was the vague but permanent object of my thoughts.

I'm sure the other 75% is equally erudite. But, for me, it was like being trapped at a party with someone who only wants to tell you the route they drove on the motorway. And how that reminds them of the journey their sister once took driving to Carmarthen. And why the song on the car radio brought back memories of a petrol station in Slough.

The bit about the madeleines isn't nearly as iconic as people suggest.