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A review by echooutside
Swann's Way by Marcel Proust
2.0
I don't care what literature laws I am breaking by saying this, PROUST SUCKS. Listen listen, their writing style was so elegantly beautiful but just the plot?? and the philosophy?? I genuinely could not tell wtf the storyline even was and what the relevance was. Jk it was about the art of reflecting back on one's life and love BUT LIKE it was just told so horribly and like the main point was made through way too many details it just I hated it I hated every single second I spent reading this book if you could not tell by the almost month long time period it took me to finish. Anyways, Proust is a well respected author, and again, wrote so intricately and graceful that I have to appreciate some of the magnificent quotes from this book:
"But when nothing else is left of one's remote past, when the people one knew are dead and buried and the things they used have disintegrated, two survivors will live among the ruins, more delicate but more indestructible, more immaterial but more persistent and faithful than all the rest: the smell and the taste of things, prevailing like disembodied spirits, remebering, waiting, hoping and holding up on their frail but unfaltering foundation the immense edifice of Memory."
"We invariably take a long time to recognize in the individuality of a new writer's characteristics a replica of the prototype labelled "Great Talent" in our private museum of concept. For the very reason that his characteristics are new, they do not appear to be an accurate likeness of what we call talent. So instead we talk of his originality, his charm, the delicacy or power of his writing; until one day it occurs to us that those very qualities are the definition of talent."
"Of all the conditions that determine the birth of love, the one that is most essential and which can enable love to forgo all the others is that we should believe that a fellow creature partakes of an unknown mode of existence which we too could share if only that person were in love with us."
"Fact has no access to the world where beliefs grow; it had no hands in their birth and cannot bring about their deaths; it can give them the most unremitting lie without managing to discredit them, and a family may be overwhelmed by a welter of misfortunes and maladies without once questioning the clemency of their god or the competence of their doctor."
"But there were other times when we would be caught by the rain with which the little weather-man hanging outside the optician's shop had threatened us; the drops of water, like migratory birds all setting off in a body at the same moment, would fall from the sky in close formation. During their rapid flight, they do not separate or fall at random, but each drop holds to its position and attracts the following one after itself, so that the sky is as dark as whem the swallows leave. We could take refuge in the woods. When the migration seemed to be over, there wouldf always be some stragglers dawdling down late. But we would leave our shelter, for raindrops enjoy foliage and by the time the earth underneath had almost dried out there would still be one or two playing about on the veins of a leaf, hanging motionless from the top and flashing in the sun, and then sliding over the edge and dropping from a height into one's face."
"[W]hen for us the rain was already over, or else being forgiven by the Lord as His sun came out again and sent down to it, like the rays from a monstrance on an altar, golden shafts fraying into uneven lengths of light."
"But what did rain and thunderstorms matter? Bad weather in summer, unlike the shifty, unreliable fair weather of winter, is only a surface disturbance, a passing whim of the prevailing but underlying fine weather which has settled over the land, consolidating its position with thickets of foliage and festooning for the whole season village streets, the walls of houses and back gardens with its buntinhg of white or violet silks. From the little drawing-room, where I would sit reading until dinner-time, I could hear the water dripping off our horse-chestnuts, but I knew the torrents of rain would only smarten up the leaves and that the trees, like pledges of summer's good intentions, promised to stay there throughout the stormy hours of darkness and to ensure the continuation of the fine weather; that the rain could do its worst, but tomorrow at Tansonville there would be just as many little heart-shaped leaves waving at me over the white fence; and so it was without sadness that I watched the popular out in the Rue des Perchamps desparately bowing and scraping before the storm and heard from the bottom of the garden the last muffled thunder murmuring among the lilacs."
"Thus, at an age when it would appear (wince what one seeks above all in love is a subjective pleasure) that one's taste for a certain woman's beauty should motivate in large measure the love one feels for her, that same love can arise, and exist at the most carnal level, without ever having been preceded by any desire for her. At that stage of life, one has already experienced several bouts of love; it no longer goes through its spontaneous evolution, in accordance with its own fateful mysterious laws, in the presence of one's astonished and passive heart. One helps it along, tampering with its progress through memory or suggestion; one recognizes a simgle sympton of it, and remembers or recreats the rest. It is a melody we know by heart, imprinted in us in its entirety, and one has no need to be reminded by a women of its opening notes in order to recall how it goes on. And if she starts in the middle of it, at the point where two hearts are feeling closer, where one beings to speak of being unable to go on existing without eachh other, then the tune is familiar enough for us to be able to join in with her at the right bar."
"The reality I had oncce known no longer existed...Places we used to know are not situated solely in the world of space; that is merely where the mind puts them, for the sake of convenience. They were never anything more than a slender slice of reality, surrounded by the mass of contiguous impressions which composed our total life at a particular time. The memory of a certain impression is nothing other than one's regret for a certain moment; and houses, thoroughfares and paths through the woods are, alas, as fleeting as the years."
AHHHHHHHHH
"But when nothing else is left of one's remote past, when the people one knew are dead and buried and the things they used have disintegrated, two survivors will live among the ruins, more delicate but more indestructible, more immaterial but more persistent and faithful than all the rest: the smell and the taste of things, prevailing like disembodied spirits, remebering, waiting, hoping and holding up on their frail but unfaltering foundation the immense edifice of Memory."
"We invariably take a long time to recognize in the individuality of a new writer's characteristics a replica of the prototype labelled "Great Talent" in our private museum of concept. For the very reason that his characteristics are new, they do not appear to be an accurate likeness of what we call talent. So instead we talk of his originality, his charm, the delicacy or power of his writing; until one day it occurs to us that those very qualities are the definition of talent."
"Of all the conditions that determine the birth of love, the one that is most essential and which can enable love to forgo all the others is that we should believe that a fellow creature partakes of an unknown mode of existence which we too could share if only that person were in love with us."
"Fact has no access to the world where beliefs grow; it had no hands in their birth and cannot bring about their deaths; it can give them the most unremitting lie without managing to discredit them, and a family may be overwhelmed by a welter of misfortunes and maladies without once questioning the clemency of their god or the competence of their doctor."
"But there were other times when we would be caught by the rain with which the little weather-man hanging outside the optician's shop had threatened us; the drops of water, like migratory birds all setting off in a body at the same moment, would fall from the sky in close formation. During their rapid flight, they do not separate or fall at random, but each drop holds to its position and attracts the following one after itself, so that the sky is as dark as whem the swallows leave. We could take refuge in the woods. When the migration seemed to be over, there wouldf always be some stragglers dawdling down late. But we would leave our shelter, for raindrops enjoy foliage and by the time the earth underneath had almost dried out there would still be one or two playing about on the veins of a leaf, hanging motionless from the top and flashing in the sun, and then sliding over the edge and dropping from a height into one's face."
"[W]hen for us the rain was already over, or else being forgiven by the Lord as His sun came out again and sent down to it, like the rays from a monstrance on an altar, golden shafts fraying into uneven lengths of light."
"But what did rain and thunderstorms matter? Bad weather in summer, unlike the shifty, unreliable fair weather of winter, is only a surface disturbance, a passing whim of the prevailing but underlying fine weather which has settled over the land, consolidating its position with thickets of foliage and festooning for the whole season village streets, the walls of houses and back gardens with its buntinhg of white or violet silks. From the little drawing-room, where I would sit reading until dinner-time, I could hear the water dripping off our horse-chestnuts, but I knew the torrents of rain would only smarten up the leaves and that the trees, like pledges of summer's good intentions, promised to stay there throughout the stormy hours of darkness and to ensure the continuation of the fine weather; that the rain could do its worst, but tomorrow at Tansonville there would be just as many little heart-shaped leaves waving at me over the white fence; and so it was without sadness that I watched the popular out in the Rue des Perchamps desparately bowing and scraping before the storm and heard from the bottom of the garden the last muffled thunder murmuring among the lilacs."
"Thus, at an age when it would appear (wince what one seeks above all in love is a subjective pleasure) that one's taste for a certain woman's beauty should motivate in large measure the love one feels for her, that same love can arise, and exist at the most carnal level, without ever having been preceded by any desire for her. At that stage of life, one has already experienced several bouts of love; it no longer goes through its spontaneous evolution, in accordance with its own fateful mysterious laws, in the presence of one's astonished and passive heart. One helps it along, tampering with its progress through memory or suggestion; one recognizes a simgle sympton of it, and remembers or recreats the rest. It is a melody we know by heart, imprinted in us in its entirety, and one has no need to be reminded by a women of its opening notes in order to recall how it goes on. And if she starts in the middle of it, at the point where two hearts are feeling closer, where one beings to speak of being unable to go on existing without eachh other, then the tune is familiar enough for us to be able to join in with her at the right bar."
"The reality I had oncce known no longer existed...Places we used to know are not situated solely in the world of space; that is merely where the mind puts them, for the sake of convenience. They were never anything more than a slender slice of reality, surrounded by the mass of contiguous impressions which composed our total life at a particular time. The memory of a certain impression is nothing other than one's regret for a certain moment; and houses, thoroughfares and paths through the woods are, alas, as fleeting as the years."
AHHHHHHHHH