A review by hadeanstars
Swann's Way by Marcel Proust

4.0

Another contender for the greatest novel in the history of literature. I can appreciate its qualities, for they are manifold, but no, not for me the greatest. Great, certainly, although this is only the first part of a wider work, and I will almost certainly read through the remaining five, vast volumes, but this is not a writer to take on lightly. It requitres considerable concentration and motivation to read. The narrative is unusual since it is in every sense a memoir of the most detailed and insular kind. A hundred pages are devoted to a small child's decision to get out of bed and the repercussions that might entail in the boy's complex relationship with his mother, still more to the stream of consciousness evoked by the taste of a madeleine biscuit. Later we read about the amorous adventures of a friend of the family and the ruination of a man by a shallow woman who all too readily plays games of love with her amour's affections. It is in every sense a remarkable and brilliant work, but not for the faint hearted. Some of the imagery evoked is wonderful, a truly lost world that one can only yearn for in many ways, a world of simpler pleasures and more wholesome values, attended though by the same human complications of love, rejection and the pining away into gloomy conjectures that is the lot of so many, whetever the epoch.