Book # 48 Remembrance of Things Past (Part 2 of 7)- Within a Budding Grove by Marcel Proust

Surprisingly I really enjoyed the first part of Remembrance of Things Past and was anxious to start volume 2, Within a Budding Grove. The second volume picks up right were the last one left off. The book is broken into two parts.. and it is funny at how little plot there is for something that is over 550 pages.

In the first part the Narrator continues to be in love with Gilberte and manages to work his way deeper into her life. He slowly becomes friends with her mother Odette and after awhile Gilberte drifts away from the Narrator and he very slowly tries to get over her. In the second half, the narrator goes with his grandmother to stay at Balbec a town near the sea. They meet a bunch of people, make friends and the Narrator sees a group of girls going around the town. He eventually gets introduced to them and he falls in love with one of them in particular, Albertine. Then he has to return home. The end.

I'm not sure if this is the kind of book one reads for the plot. It just rambles on and on and the author frequently goes off on tangents and takes pages to return to what he was originally talking about. I found one sentence that was half a page and at least two five page paragraphs. I found the Narrator's thoughts really funny and interesting though (for the most part). At one point he goes on for thirty pages about how he went to go see a famous actress in a play and was totally disappointed but also fascinated and wanted to learn exactly why everyone else thought that she was so great. He also shares his insights into music and art. A lot of the time he seems to be reconciling his initial expectations and feelings about something or someone and what he eventually learns about that something or someone. He also talks a lot about memory and he now interprets older events.

The book is also full of great lines... Since I'm reading a translated work I'm curious how some of these sentences come off in the original French, but I have to give some credit to the translator, C. K. Scott  Moncrieff, for making them sound great in English. Maybe I'll checkout a different translation to see how it compares.

Examples...

"She was the sort of woman with whom shaking hands affords so much pleasure that one feels grateful to civilisation for having made of the handclasp a lawful act between boys and girls when they meet"

"So it is that a well-read man will at once begin to yawn with boredom when one speaks to him of a new "good book," because he imagines a sort of composite of all the good books that he has read, whereas a good book is something special, something unforeseeable, and is made up not of the sum of all previous masterpieces but of something which the most thorough assimilation of every one of them would not enable him to discover, since it exists not in their sum but beyond it."

"In confronting our memory with the new reality it is this that will mark the extent of our disappointment or surprise, will appear to us like a revised version of the reality by notifying us that we had not remembered correctly."

I'll give volume 2 an A.