The first two volumes of Remembrance of Things Past were enjoyable mostly because of Proust's insights into life and the way he described and remembered everything people experience. The third volume The Guermantes Way picks up right after the end of the second volume with the Narrator moving into a new home after his vacation. And then pretty much nothing happens for the next 600 pages. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but instead of the narrator describing his own life, he becomes obsessed with his neighbors, The Guermantes, and wants to get to know everything about them. He eventually worms his way into their social circle and he just goes on and on and on about the lives of all the upper class Dukes and Duchesses he meets. And that is pretty much the bulk of the book. And to make it worse, all of the people he meets seem to be really snobby and just spend all of their time putting each other down. Plus I started to get all the characters confused because they have weird French titles and names; but that doesn't matter because there is no story. Still... at some points the Narrator tells of a few events that happen to him and these sections are really good. The sequence when his grandmother becomes ill is very touching and the inner conflict he describes when he can't decide if he should tell his best friend that his friend's girlfriend is actually a prostitute is memorable. It becomes clear in this volume that the Narrator is a weird sorta guy that becomes obsessed with people for no reason and has a knack for inserting himself into different social circles by just being persistent. When the novel focuses on his thoughts about life I really enjoyed it, but too frequently he gets lost in describing all the conversations between rich snobby French people about the politics of the time. I'll give this one a B.
Sunday, June 9, 2013
Book # 48 Remembrance of Things Past (Part 3 of 7)- The Guermantes Way by Marcel Proust
The first two volumes of Remembrance of Things Past were enjoyable mostly because of Proust's insights into life and the way he described and remembered everything people experience. The third volume The Guermantes Way picks up right after the end of the second volume with the Narrator moving into a new home after his vacation. And then pretty much nothing happens for the next 600 pages. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but instead of the narrator describing his own life, he becomes obsessed with his neighbors, The Guermantes, and wants to get to know everything about them. He eventually worms his way into their social circle and he just goes on and on and on about the lives of all the upper class Dukes and Duchesses he meets. And that is pretty much the bulk of the book. And to make it worse, all of the people he meets seem to be really snobby and just spend all of their time putting each other down. Plus I started to get all the characters confused because they have weird French titles and names; but that doesn't matter because there is no story. Still... at some points the Narrator tells of a few events that happen to him and these sections are really good. The sequence when his grandmother becomes ill is very touching and the inner conflict he describes when he can't decide if he should tell his best friend that his friend's girlfriend is actually a prostitute is memorable. It becomes clear in this volume that the Narrator is a weird sorta guy that becomes obsessed with people for no reason and has a knack for inserting himself into different social circles by just being persistent. When the novel focuses on his thoughts about life I really enjoyed it, but too frequently he gets lost in describing all the conversations between rich snobby French people about the politics of the time. I'll give this one a B.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment