Violet wells's Reviews > In Search of Lost Time: Volume 1: The Way by Swann's

Proust is probably the author I most pretend to love more than I do. In certain company to admit preferring dozens of other authors can feel like acknowledging some strain of mediocrity in one's intellect and critical faculties. Joyce is the other one. Though I don't often make any pretence of loving Joyce, except his story The Dead and parts of Ulysses. Proust and Joyce - the two sacred cows of 20th century literature. That said, Proust had a huge influence on two of my favourite writers - Woolf and Nabokov - so I've never questioned his genius even if I couldn't always connect with it. So rereading Proust twenty years after my first experience of him felt, to some degree, as though I was putting my intellect to a test.

Pretty quickly I remembered the problems I had with him. Firstly the way he structures sentences, his dissonant syntax. For someone who loves music so much it's odd how eccentric his relationship with rhythm is. As happened the first time I read him I found myself losing the thread half way through one of his clunky estranging labyrinthine sentences. Proust takes pleasure in snatching one thread from you mid-sentence and handing you another one. Then you find you're holding both and sometimes they've been beautifully embroidered together, sometimes they still seem raggedly disparate. And he forces you to read more slowly than you're accustomed to. This, too, can be tiresome until he finally succeeds in subverting your rhythms to his more laborious discordant cadences. I also quickly learned to be wary of anything in parentheses. In essence I don't much like the way he writes, his style. And then of all the great writers Proust can be more boring than most. I suppose Woolf eventually got a bit boring in The Years and Between the Acts. Tolstoy was boring at the end of War and Peace. But Proust is often boring in the midst of his brilliance. With Proust you can get one of the best pages in the history of literature followed a few pages later by what I could only feel was purple prosed whimsy.

But then, one also has to acknowledge the human mind often works how Proust writes it. He captures some essence of the mind's mechanics in any given moment. Proust perhaps has more to say about the workings of consciousness, the timelessness of the human mind, than any other writer. No one has ever anatomised the swarm of sensibility active in each passing moment like him. He makes us aware of how time happens on many different levels. And how mutable and ongoing is all experience. There are no full stops in the human mind. There is no final draft.

And he also, through Swann, makes us realise how much of our time we waste on misguided pursuits.

Swann is a brilliant depiction of the disparity between inner man and social persona. Something Woolf tried less successfully in Mrs Dalloway. (No surprise she read Proust just before writing Mrs Dalloway.) He forces us to ask questions about authenticity, the notion of a true self. All Swann's diligently earned accomplishments to represent himself to the world as erudite, cultured, eloquent and dignified are torn to shreds by his slavish and rather pathetic obsession with the unworthy Odette. The sense of self he had constructed is revealed as a sham. There's a great quote by Hilary Mantel about the authenticity of self in her book about her experience of surgery. "Illness strips you back to an authentic self, but not one you need to meet. Too much is claimed for authenticity. Painfully we learn to live in the world, and to be false. Then all our defences are knocked down in one sweep. In sickness we can't avoid knowing about our body and what it does, its animal aspect, its demands. We see things that never should be seen; our inside is outside, the body's sewer pipes and vaults exposed to view, as if in a woodcut of our own martyrdom." Odette is Swann's sickness.

The last few pages made me laugh where Proust as an old man is horrified by the vulgarity of the fashions now prevalent compared to the elegance of the aesthetic he remembers as a young man. If he thought that was bad - 1920 - heaven only knows what level of disgust he'd reach at how we choose to clothe ourselves nowadays. It occurred to me then that for more than a century now you could argue fashion gets more garish and vulgar with every new decade. It's perhaps one of the reasons historical fiction/cinema is so popular - people were a lot more beautiful to look at in the past. How we dress is an example of how, in the evolution of the species, practicality has almost completely eclipsed poetry as the touchstone.

I'm tempted to give this 4 stars because that would reflect my level of enjoyment but it's miles better than any other book I've given four stars to so it has to be five, despite the problems I encountered.