Name: In Search of Lost Time, Vol. III
ISBN: 9780375752339

Marcel Proust

D. J. Enright

The Guermantes Way

In Search of Lost Time, Vol. III

jess

a certain limerence in prefacing the process of adulthood in spectrum of parties and friendship sets its stage in transcending through labyrinths of social intricacies, profound introspection, and the relentless pursuit of elusive truths. glittering soirées and opulent salons become crucibles where the delicate balance tips over between facade and authenticity. past, present, and future coalesce in a kaleidoscope of recollections; memories of profound meditation on the nature of time itself. 3.5.

Emmett

"We feel in one world, we think, we give names to things in another; between the two we can establish a certain correspondence, but not bridge the interval."

The best so far, such that the surprise is not that Volume II won the Prix Goncourt, but that Volume III did not win it again. The political and aesthetic comments take on a greater maturity and certainty of pronouncement (one may marvel at the blending of the political and the artistic tendencies within the natural flow of conversation). There is quite a bit more action and humour than the previous two, especially with characters such as the Baron de Charlus, whose intentions and behaviours still remain a puzzle, and the narrator who has been given a greater slice of agency and self-consciousness when he had been largely transparent. A book that constantly defers and refers (the characteristic 'as we shall see later on') creates the need for self-reference as a means of appreciation and this reader's anticipation for what is to come next in its wandering brilliance. This is not to say every passage was delightful (there are several that were an absolute bore), but the points that delight less one feels that it is just a matter of predilection, interest and taste, and that someone else may find the same joy and opportunity for intelligent scrutiny in them that one has found elsewhere. Part of the pleasure is that the book refrains from explicit direction - saying, this is what you should think about this sentence, or this is the correct and definite assessment of so-and-so - and the reader's involvement is in picking and choosing (or letting his mind and his likes and dislikes to that), finding what thrills him as he wanders and eavesdrops on conversations and inner thoughts, and not being afraid to not find pleasure in everything. It is a novel of variety for a variety of tastes.

On the abrupt ending of a telephone call:
"I continued to call her, sounding the empty night, in which I felt that her appeals also must be straying. I was shaken by the same anguish which, in the distant past, I had felt once before, one day when, a little child, in the crowd, I had lost her, an anguish due less to my not finding her than to the thought that she must be searching for me, must be saying to herself that I was searching for her; an anguish comparable to that which I was to feel on the day when we speak to those who can no longer reply and whom we would so love to have hear all the things that we have not told them, and our assurance that we are not unhappy."

(Reading this passage set a thought wandering, a similar statement made by a film critic - whose name this reader has forgotten, and whether he/she knew Proust had made such an observation many decades before, I do not know - who discussed the strangeness (and symbolic repercussions) of the detachment of sound from image as a landmark of modern existence. As demonstrated by the telephone, by the nature of film soundtrack; this is nothing extraordinary to everyday carriers of mobile phones, but Proust conveys something of the mysterious and the inexplicable, that alien quality it must have conveyed to people in the early 20th century who prior to the invention of the telephone had only letters and photographs, which are no substitute for two people meeting. The voice, and the voice alone, however, manages to make real a small part of what that meeting would have constituted, when it must have seemed inconceivable that someone's voice could ever be heard when they were not around.)

"We may, indeed, say that the hour of death is uncertain, but when we say so we represent that hour to ourselves as situated in a vague and remote expanse of time, it never occurs to us that it can have any connexion with the day that has already dawned, or may signify that death ... may occur this afternoon, so far from uncertain, this afternoon every hour of which has already been allotted to some occupation."

In Search of Lost Time, Vol. III The Guermantes Way