Swann's Way by Marcel ProustMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
It is impossible to capture all the splendor of this book in a review. That's not an excuse, it's the simple truth. Swann's Way is one of the most beautiful, most human novels I've read, and it's only the first in the epic In Search of Lost Time. Will I read the rest? Unlikely. Ironically, there's just not enough time.
However, this was anything but a difficult read. It's nothing like Joyce or Beckett or Melville, for example. Yes, the sentences notoriously go on and on (in once case, I seem to remember one sentence going on for three pages straight, maybe more), but once the reader gives themself up to the rhythm of the novel, one becomes enfolded in it. It is an easy read, easy on the brain, easy on the soul.
The only way I can describe Proust's prose is to use the analogy of natural pearls on a string. Each is different from one another, each shines with the same lustre, and all together they compound delicately accrete into something even more beautiful as a whole. One has to read the whole work, studying each sentence on its own merits. I could provide inumerable quotes that illustrate the beauty of the prose, but then I would be quoting nearly the entire book. Suffice it to say that Proust out-Huysman's Huysman by turning the seemingly banal into a celestial scene without succumbing to the temptation to bejewel the prose with gaudy embellishments. Take, for example, part of the account of Odette sprucing up the room into which she had invited Swann:
But when her footman came into the room bringing, one after another, the innumberable lamps which (contained, mostly, in porcelain vases) burned singly or in pairs upon the different pieces of furniture as upon so many altars, rekindling in the twilight, already almost nocturnal, of this winter afternoon the glow of a sunset more lasting, more roseate, more human - filling, perhaps, with romantic wonder the thoughts of some solitary lover wandering in the street below and brought to a standstill before the mystery of the human presence which those lighted windows at once revealed and screened from sight - she had kept a sharp eye on the servant, to see that he set them down in their appointed places. She felt that if he were to put even one of them where it ought not to be the general effect of her drawing-room would be destroyed, and her portrait, which rested upon a sloping easel draped with plush, inadequately lit. And so she followed the man's clumsy movements with feverish impatience, scolding him severely when he passed too close to a pair of jardinieres, which she made a point of always cleaning herself for fear that they might be damaged, and went across to examine now to make sure he had not chipped them. She found something "quaint" in the shape of each of her Chinese ornaments, and also in her orchids, the cattleyas especially - these being, with chrysathemums, her favourite flowers, because they had the supreme merit of not looking like flowers, but of being made, apparently, of silk or satin. "This one looks just as though it had been cut out of the lining of my cloak," she said to Swann, pointing to an orchid, with a shade of respect in her voice for so "chic" a flower, for this elegant, unexpected sister whom nature had bestowed upon her, so far removed from her in the scale of existence, and yet so delicate, so refined, so much more worthy than many real women of admission to her drawing-room. As she drew his attention, now to the fiery-tongued dragons painted on a bowl or stitched on a screen, now to a fleshy cluster of orchids, now to a dromedary of inlaid silverwork with ruby eyes which kept company, upon her mantelpiece, with a toad carved in jade, she would pretend now to be shrinking from the ferocity of the monsters or laughing at their absurdity, now blushing at the indecency of the flowers, now carried away by an irresistible desire to run across and kiss the toad and dromedary, calling hem "darlings". And these affectations were in sharp contrast to the sincerity of some of her attitudes, notably her devotion to Our Lady of Laghet, who had once, when Odette was living at Nice, cured her of a mortal illness, and whose medal, in gold, she always carried on her person, attributing to it unlimited powers.
Analysis of this passage seems to me a petty blasphemy. This book is to be read. It is, more than any other book I can think of, a reader's book. I have absolutely no desire to dissect this book (I'll leave that to the professionals, such as Roger Shattuck). I enjoyed it, and I just want to leave it that way. And that might be just about the best compliment I can give a simply beautiful work of fiction. Maybe the simply beautiful work of fiction.
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