Before I talk about Proust, I want to talk about Goodreads! I'm obsessed!! It is very similar to Amazon's Shelfari, which I love and is the source of my cool bookshelf at the bottom of my blog (for those of you who can't see it, it is not available on the mobile blog). I added a "reading now" bookshelf from Goodreads to the top of my blog, so now I have two cool widgets! Also, I like Goodreads because you can easily update progress in books, marking page numbers and writing comments along the way. Another cool thing is that, for the iPhone and iPad (probably also for Andorid), the Goodreads app has lots of books directly available as e-books.
The Guermantes Way follows the narrator, as yet still unnamed, as his family moves to an apartment in Paris, owned by the Duc and Duchesse of Guermantes. In the first volume, Swann's Way, the narrator talks about two different routes his family would take when going out for a walk in Combray, the first being the Méséglise way, or Swann's way, where he first saw Gilberte. The second route was the Guermantes way, for through it one would pass the Guermantes forests and lands. To the narrator, the name was always filled with the poetry of land, ancestry, grandness, and history, but he never had an opportunity to know the Guermantes himself. Here is and excerpt from Swann's Way in which the narrator first ruminates on the associations he makes with the Guermantes name.
"Nor could we ever reach that other goal, to which I longed so much to attain, Guermantes itself. I knew that it was the residence of its proprietors, the Duc and Duchesse de Guermantes, I knew that they were real personages who did actually exist, but whenever I thought about them I pictured them to myself either in tapestry, as was the ’Coronation of Esther’ which hung in our church, or else in changing, rainbow colours, as was Gilbert the Bad in his window, where he passed from cabbage green, when I was dipping my fingers in the holy water stoup, to plum blue when I had reached our row of chairs, or again altogether impalpable, like the image of Geneviève de Brabant, ancestress of the Guermantes family, which the magic lantern sent wandering over the curtains of my room or flung aloft upon the ceiling–in short, always wrapped in the mystery of the Merovingian age, and bathed, as in a sunset, in the orange light which glowed from the resounding syllable ’antes.’ And if, in spite of that, they were for me, in their capacity as a duke and a duchess, real people, though of an unfamiliar kind, this ducal personality was in its turn enormously distended, immaterialised, so as to encircle and contain that Guermantes of which they were duke and duchess, all that sunlit ’Guermantes way’ of our walks, the course of the Vivonne, its water-lilies and its overshadowing trees, and an endless series of hot summer afternoons."
In Vol. 2, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, the narrator finally meets some members of the Guermantes family while on vacation in Balbec, namely Madame de Villeparisis and her nephew Robert Saint-Loup, who becomes a good friend to our crazy, selfish protagonist (though the latter has no desire for friendships). In The Guermantes Way, the narrator, old enough now to frequent salons, falls "in love" with the Duchesse. It is only after he gives up this silly notion that the Duchesse, Oriane, starts inviting the boy to her house. Up until this point, the novel followed the narrator as he visited Saint-Loup in his barracks, for Robert is a soldier, and various other happenings, like finding out that Saint-Loup's beloved mistress is really the prostitute the narrator frequented in Volume 2. Throughout it all, the reader is constantly met with beautiful explanations of the ways in which humans perceive and understand people, places, events.
I have talked about the narrator and protagonist of the In Search of Lost Time before, about his (to but it bluntly) sissyness, his slightly neurotic behavior. In this book, I find him to be a little less so. Many other readers who have read the book may disagree with me on this, citing his obsession over the Duchesse de Guermantes as an indication that he may not have changed much since the previous novels. His saving grace, I believe, is his reaction to the society he is finally able to penetrate, the Faubourg Saint-Germain. He is extremely disillusioned with it. He finds the aristocratic nobility to be boring, dull, not that intelligent (though one cannot forget the "Guermantes wit," about which one can read here), and the same as any other people he might meet. He enjoys, however, when he sees vestiges of what he always imagined the name Guermantes, and thus the people who embody that name, to possess, such as when noticing traits that have been embedded into the family, be they physical aspects or mannerisms.
The writing in The Guermantes Way is definitely not as convoluted as in the previous volumes, which is good in that the reading was a little quicker and not as difficult. Plus, as the book progressed, there were many occasions where I was faced with one of Proust's beautiful, architectural sentences that need dissecting and close reading. There are just a few situations where the book could have used slight editing, when something was repeated as if it had never been mentioned, but nothing to lower the quality of the book.
I loved this volume! I can't say which of the three I've enjoyed more, but this might be it! Another thing I enjoyed was the humor. Maybe I just hadn't been looking for this in the other volumes, and, granted, it is something I don't usually pick up on, but I had not really noticed sarcasm in In Search of Lost Time before. One humorous instance takes place in the Oriane's salon. The narrator is being told by some royalty or other that he, the prince, had recently run into Rachel, Saint-Loup's mistress, who had told the man about Saint-Loup's close relationship with Marcel. (In fact, Saint-Loup is very intense with their friendship, often treating Marcel more like a lover than a friend.) Marcel responds innocently to the prince that Rachel would thus have reason to be upset and jealous at his own special treatment. The prince makes a sly comment about homosexuality that Marcel does not seem to understand and tells Marcel that, if he really doesn't get it, he is welcome to go over to the prince's house after the dinner so he can explain. Of course, Marcel doesn't get this either, but declines the invitation anyways. It was a funny little instance, and there are others.
In cases like this, and more specifically with the deeper look at the character M. de Charlus, also a Guermantes, The Guermantes Way prepares the reader for what is to be explored in the next volume, Sodom and Gomorrah: homosexuality.
I am excited with my timing for this reading. Over winter break I will be visiting Belgium, but also Paris, and I am excited to be reading Proust for that! Visiting places like the Champs-Élysées and the Bois de Boulogne is going to be extra exciting for me. The funny thing is, this is a perfect example of what Proust himself talks about: the ways in which place-names take on extra meanings for people.
I finally started The Casual Vacancy!!!! I'm only about a hundred pages in (even though I only started it yesterday! I really can't put it down) and love it. It is definitely about all the things you have read about on reviews, like drugs, sex, etc., but so far, her characters are more relatable than I had imagined they would be. Her writing is unpretentious and straightforward, but not without some really well-crafted paragraphs. For what it's worth, I got to the first mention of Rihanna's song Umbrella and, though it still weirds me out that Rowling chose that song (out of all of Rihanna's great songs!!!), at least she is looking at the song lyrics critically. But that is the last I shall say about Umbrella….
Anyways, I am done with this post, but I will post again later today with quotes from Vonnegut's Timequake and from Proust's The Guermantes Way. Until then, readers!
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