In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower #2

In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (À l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs) (Penguin Classics, 2004)
by Marcel Proust [translated from the French by James Grieve]
France, 1919

Having left off my earlier post on/love letter to In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower with a nod to that extraordinarily lyrical scene where the narrator renders homage to the memory of Mme Swann sauntering along the Avenue du Bois-de-Boulogne one fine day in May, "at the glorious height of her own mellow and still-delectable summertime" (215), I thought it might be worthwhile to take an extended look at more of Proust on time and memory.  After all, that's one of the reasons we read the guy, right? Even though Part II begins with an off the cuff announcement by the narrator acknowledging his own dislocation in time due to the impact that painful memories of his happier days with Gilberte are having on his present day reality--"life being so unchronological, so anachronistic in its disordering of our days" (221)--one of the things that's so alluring about this parenthetical confession from an artistic standpoint is how it ties in with several other perspectives on time and memory and the literary representation of time and memory from various stages of the narrator's life.  Three examples of how this problem is creatively engaged in the text follow.

Going back to the early scene where his father essentially abandons encouraging him to pursue a diplomatic career so that young Marcel can take up a life in literature unimpeded by his family's opposition, for example, the narrator writes that this happy news nonetheless made him worry for two reasons.

The first was that, though I met each new day with the thought that I was now on the threshold of life, which still lay before me all unlived and was about to start the very next day, not only had my life in fact begun, but the years to come would not be very different from the years already elapsed.  The second, which was really only a variant of the first, was that I did not live outside Time but was subject to its laws, as completely as the fictional characters whose lives, for that very reason, had made me feel so sad when I read them of them at Combray, sitting inside my wickerwork shelter (55).

I like this sequence for at least a couple of reasons, the first having to do with the somewhat unfortunate reminder that I was once so young myself that I surely considered myself on "the threshold of life" without realizing my life had already begun.  A nice--if bittersweet--touch, that!  I also appreciate it for the way that the adult narrator merges his then-youthful awakening to the concept of not living outside Time in a way that draws attention to the character's sentimental regard for the fate of the fictional characters encountered in his wickerwork shelter.  This conflation of a person's reading life with one's emotional life outside of literature is something I can rather pathetically relate to, of course, so suffice it to say that the writing really got my attention when the correspondance was extended to a larger concern with mortality in the lines that immediately follow.

Theoretically, we are aware that the earth is spinning, but in reality we do not notice it: the ground we walk on seems to be stationary and gives no cause for alarm.  The same happens with Time.  To make its passing perceptible, novelists have to turn the hands of the clock at dizzying speed, to make the reader live through ten, twenty, thirty years in two minutes.  At the top of a page, we have been with a lover full of hope; at the foot of the following one, we see him again, already an octogenarian, hobbling his painful daily way round the courtyard of an old-people's home, barely acknowledging greetings, remembering nothing of his past.  When my father said, "He's not a child anymore, he's not going to change his mind," etc., he suddenly showed me myself living inside Time; and he filled me with sadness, as though I was not quite the senile inmate of the poorhouse, but one of those heroes dismissed by the writer in the final chapter with a turn of phrase that is cruel in its indifference: "He has taken to absenting himself less and less from the countryside.  He has eventually settled down there for good," etc. (55-56)

While any novel called In Search of Lost Time might be expected to deal such with themes, this treatment of time in a text organized in part as a written suspension of time has a lot to say about what's possible from a temporal standpoint when representing "reality" in literature.  This is one of the philosophical sides of Proust the thinker that really gets to me just as much as Proust the wordsmith or Proust the visually evocative portraitist of Mme Swann.

In a much later scene, at a time in which the love-hungry Marcel is now fixated on making the acquaintance of Albertine Simonet and the other young girls in flower in her inner circle of Balbec friends and companions, the looming shadows of mortality from the earlier episode seem to have dissipated in the salty seaside air.  Still, there's another striking analysis of how our attempts to try and fix a moment in time are often disturbed by the emotions of the moment.  In this passage, Marcel speaks of the various things that form the mundane build-up to his much-anticipated introduction to his future love interest at a party given by the painter Elstir:

Being obliged, in order to come eventually to a chat with Mlle Simonet, to follow a route that was not of my own design, which reached a first destination in front of Elstir, before leading me to on other groups of guests, to whom I was introduced, then along the buffet, where I was handed, and where I ate, strawberry tarts, while pausing to listen to music that had just begun to be played, I found myself giving to these various episodes the same importance as to my introduction to Mlle Simonet, which was only one among their sequence, and which I had by now completely forgotten had been, a few minutes before, the sole object of my presence there.  Does not the same happen, in busy everyday life, to our truest joys and greatest sorrows?  We stand among other people, and the woman we adore gives us the answer, favorable or fatal, that we have been awaiting for a year: we must go on chatting; ideas lead to other ideas, making a surface beneath which, rising only from time to time, barely perceptible, lies the knowledge, very deep but acute, that calamity has struck.  Or, if it is happiness rather than calamity, we may not remember till years later that the most momentous event of our emotional life happened in a way that gives us no time to pay attention to it, or even to be aware of it almost, during a fashionable reception, say, despite the fact that it was in expectation of some such event that we had gone to it (450-451).

In this snapshot of the "momentous" event that is about to take place for the narrator and of an event where the narrator's fate will largely be determined by forces beyond his control, we have--in contrast to the ethereal details we might expect from such an obvious romantic--a rather non-romantic description of the everyday moments that surround the high and low points in our lives.  The scene is almost pedestrian, in fact--except for the attention that is drawn to how we replay such moments in our memories, overlooking the details not having to do with fortune or calamity.  However, pointing out the way in which the scene feels true or false to the reader from a realistic perspective is only part of the equation as what takes place in our minds is just as much reality as what takes place in front of our eyes in many respects.  This, at least, is what I think Proust's narrator is getting at here when he writes about his introduction to Albertine and says that "the pleasure, of course, I did not experience till a little later, back at the hotel, when, having been alone for a while, I was myself again.  Pleasures are like photographs: in the presence of the person we love, we take only negatives, which we develop later, at home, when we have at our disposal once more in our inner darkroom, the door of which it is strictly forbidden to open while others are present" (451).

Studiously avoiding the fact that I don't really know where I'm going with all this nor know whether Proust has left us an Einstein-like general theory on time anywhere in his extended novel, I have to say that I'm finding reading In Search of Lost Time its own reward and writing about In Search of Lost Time at least partially rewarding in terms of publicly revisiting certain favorite scenes.  On that note, I'd like to bid farewell to this post on Proust on time and memory with a fragment from a scene that harkens back to an earlier such scene in Swann's Way.  For late in In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, walking along a lane in the direction of Les Creuniers with the beautiful Andrée, the narrator discovers something that takes his mind off his plan to win himself a spot in Albertine's affections by showering her with praises to her friend and possible rival:

Then, halfway down the little lane, I stood still, as the soft flutter of a childhood memory brushed my heart: I had just recognized, from the indentations of the shiny leaves overhanging the threshold, a hawthorn bush, which since the end of spring, alas, had been bare of all blossom.  A fragrance of forgotten months of Mary and long-lost Sunday afternoons, beliefs, and fallacies surrounded me.  I wished I could grasp it as it passed.  Andrée, seeing me pause, showed her charming gift of insight by letting me commune for a moment with the leaves of the little tree: I asked after its blossom, hawthorn flowers like blithe young girls, a little silly, flirtatious, and faithful.  "Those young ladies left long ago," said the leaves, possibly reflecting that, for someone who professed to be such a close friend, I was very uninformed about their habits.  I was a close friend, though one who, despite his promises, had lost touch with them for many years.  Yet, just as Gilberte had been my first sweetheart among the girls, they had been my first among the flowers.  "Yes, I know," I replied, "they go away about the middle of June.  But it's a pleasure to see the spot here where they lived.  My mother brought them up to see me in my bedroom at Combray, when I was ill.  And we used to meet in church on Saturday evenings during the month of Mary.  Are they allowed to go here too?"  "Of course!  My young ladies are actually much in demand at the nearest parish church, Saint-Denis-du-Désert."  "One can see them now, you mean?"  "No, no, not till the month of May next year."  "And can I be sure they'll be there?"  "Every year, without fail."  "I'm just not sure I can find my way back to this exact spot..."  "Of course you will!  My young ladies are so gay, they never stop laughing, except to sing hymns--you can't mistake them, you'll recognize their perfume from the end of the lane" (500).

So much to love here in this little conversation between man and hawthorn bush!  The rich prose, fragrant with poetry.  The wish to latch onto something tangible in the evanescent.  The commingling of an aesthetics of beauty with a sort of sensuous spirituality or mysticism.  The eternal faithfulness of old friends.  Proust is great at having his narrator reflect on time and memory through the lenses of novelists and darkroom photographers.  But he's even better when Marcel reflects on time and memory through the lens of his own life story.  Now approaching the 100-page mark in The Guermantes Way, I'm loving this novel like you wouldn't believe.  (www.penguinclassics.com)

In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower #1

In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower [À l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs] (Penguin Classics, 2004)
by Marcel Proust [translated from the French by James Grieve]
France, 1919

In the so-called "listless interlude" that forms the second volume of Proust's In Search of Lost Time amid that which might more aptly be called an expanding universe of richly-textured memories, emotions, and dramatis personae orbiting Marcel's teenage years and thereabouts, our young narrator manages to fall in and out of love with Gilberte, to lose his virginity to a woman he doesn't care for, and to fall head over heels in love yet again--not quite reciprocated to this point--with future girlfriend Albertine: a  journey of initiation that chronicles the agonies and ecstasies of love from Paris to Balbec with astonishing humor, insight and detail.  Sheer bliss.  While there's just too much for me to talk about here to even know where to begin, I suppose there's no harm in sharing a grab bag of personal highlights with you tonight and returning for something maybe a little more structured later in the week.  To begin with, I continue to be an easy mark for the narrator's catty but ever-observant humor.  Writing about the union between the aristocratic Swann and the ex-courtesan Odette that had taken place against all expectations since the events in Swann's Way had transpired, the narrator tells us that "in general, marriages that degrade one of the partners are the worthiest of all, because they entail the sacrifice of a more or less flattering situation to a purely private satisfaction--and, of course, marrying for money must be excluded from the notion of a degrading match, as no couple of whom one partner has been sold to the other has ever failed to be admitted in the end to good society, given the weight of tradition, the done thing, and the need to avoid having double standards."  A typical (and not all that humorous) observation with a fair amount to say about the superficiality of the circles these characters move in, gender relations at that time in France, the pressures of conformity, and so on.  What takes this to the genius level on the comedic and the descriptive fronts, though, is the sentence or the dagger that follows with such impeccable timing: "In any case, the idea of engaging in one of those crossbreedings common to Mendelian experiments and Greek mythology, and of joining with a creature of a different race, an archduchess, or a good-time girl, someone of blue blood or no blood at all, might well have titillated the artist, if not the pervert, in Swann" (42).  A second thing I loved about In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower is how, despite the almost ubiquitous humor and the biting observations that are also present as if for adult consumption, Proust manages to tenderly and realistically evoke that teenaged daydreamer's feeling that falling in love with just about any girl is not only possible but maybe even desirable.  While the text is nearly perfect at capturing the young protagonist's mood swings between boundless optimism and utter desperation in this regard, I particularly liked this passage where the narrator talks about those moments in his life "when I was not in love but wished I was"--a fragrant time when:

the ideal of physical beauty I carried about with me--which, as has been seen, I could recognize in a distant glimpse of any passing stranger who was far enough away for the imprecision of her features not to impede that recognition--was partnered by the emotional shadow, ever ready to be brought to real life, of the woman who was going to fall in love with me and step straight into the part already written for her in the comedy of fondness and passion that had been awaiting her since my childhood, and for which every young girl I met, as long as she had a pleasant disposition and some of the physical characteristics required by the role, appeared eager to be auditioned.  In this play, whoever it was I cast as the new star or her understudy for this part of leading lady, the outline of the plot, the main scenes, and even the words to be spoken had long since taken the form of a definitive edition (469).

Finally, in thinking about the narrative tension between the ideal and the real in love and how that frontier is constantly shifting in our memories and imaginations to the point that it's possible to confuse the real object of desire with its "emotional shadow" at times, I have to say that the end of the At Mme Swann's part of this novel--with its focus on Marcel's friendship with Mme Swann rather than his traumatizing break-up with her daughter Gilberte--touched me enormously.  Can a scene from a novel be considered poetic merely by virtue of the force of its words and the power of its images?  I'll let you decide.

From all sides now, through the liquid transparency and glossy luminosity of the shadow cast on her by the sunshade, Mme Swann was being recognized and greeted by the last of the late riders, who looked as though filmed at a canter against the white midday shimmer of the avenue, members of fashionable clubs, whose names--Antoine de Castellane, Adalbert de Montmorency, and many more--famous to the public mind, were to Mme Swann the familiar names of her friends.  So it is that the average life expectancy, the relative longevity, of memories being much greater for those that commemorate poetic sensation than for those left by the pains of love, the heartbreak I suffered at that time because of Gilberte has faded forever, and has been outlived by the pleasure I derive, whenever I want to read off from a sundial of remembrance the minutes between a quarter past twelve and one o'clock on a fine day in May, from a glimpse of myself chatting with Mme Swann, sharing her sunshade as though standing with her in the pale glow of an arbor of wisteria (217).

I'll have more to share from In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower in a day or two.  Not sure what I want to touch on next, but I'm not ready to say farewell to this volume just yet.  No, not yet.  (www.penguinclassics.com)

Marcel Proust

Swann's Way

Swann's Way [Du côté de chez Swann] (Penguin Classics, 2004)
by Marcel Proust [translated from the French by Lydia Davis]
France, 1913

No doubt, by virtue of having forever indissolubly united in me different impressions merely because they had made me experience them at the same time, the Méséglise way and the Guermantes way exposed me, for the future, to many disappointments and even to many mistakes.  For often I have wanted to see a person again without discerning that it was simply because she reminded me of a hedge of hawthorns, and I have been led to believe, to make someone else believe, in a revival of affection, by what was simply a desire to travel.  But because of that very fact, too, and by persisting in those of my impressions of today to which they may be connected, they give them foundations, depth, a dimension lacking from the others.  They add to them, too, a charm, a meaning that is for me alone.  When on summer evenings the melodious sky growls like a wild animal and everyone grumbles at the storm, it is because of the Méséglise way that I am the only one in ecstasy inhaling, through the noise of the falling rain, the smell of invisible, enduring lilacs.

(Swann's Way, 189-190)

I'll probably regret this later, but may I share a personal anecdote with you?  The morning after finally finishing Swann's Way, I was telling my boss about how much I'd loved it and how it was even more spectacular than I'd suspected it would be.  After poking fun at myself for how ridiculous it was to be surprised by any of all this--In Search of Lost Time's first volume does have something of a reputation after all--I found myself almost tearing up talking about the many things that Proust does so beautifully in the novel.  Thank God my boss is a bibliophile and understood the point I was feebly trying to make: this book got to me.  Why it got to me would probably be more easily explained in person, of course, but I think the three things that stand out about it the most are Proust's skills as an observer, his unexpected humor, and that justly celebrated all-enveloping prose which wraps you up in its velvety grip.  Examples.  In Swann in Love, in the midst of the book within a book chronicling Charles Swann's tumultuous love affair with the not quite to be trusted Odette de Crécy (a segment itself surrounded by the first and third sections of the novel that focus on the narrator's childhood memories of life at Combray and his own first impressions of how the clingy love for his mother would eventually be joined by the romantic feelings felt for Swann's daughter Gilberte), the reader is party to an agonizing close-up of the highs and lows of that "holy evil" also known as love (239).  Although the narrator proves himself to be an astute observer of the arts of deception and self-deception practiced by lovers everywhere, he saves one of his absolute best descriptive moments for Swann's non-romantic encounter with a footman at a party: "One of them, of a particularly ferocious aspect and rather like the executioner in certain Renaissance paintings which depict scenes of torture, advanced upon him with an implacable air to take his things.  But the hardness of his steely gaze was compensated by the softness of his cotton gloves, so that as he approached Swann he seemed to be showing contempt for his person and consideration for his hat" (336).  Just love those Proustian juxtapositions!

As if to demonstrate that the hilarity of this moment isn't incidental to his larger objectives in the novel, Proust provides us with at least two superb examples of elaborate and totally unexpected sources of humor that originate early on in Part I's Combray.  In the first instance, a scene poking fun at both the hypocrisy of the family maid and the narrator as a young man takes place in which the beheading of a chicken as preparation for the evening meal ends with the servant frantically shouting "Vile creature!  Vile creature!" at the unfortunate chicken, troubled by the animal's understandable resistance to its impending demise (124).  Even after the chicken has been dispatched with, though, Françoise feels the need to insult it one more time.  "Vile creature!"  Over 150 pages later, with this amusing scene long forgotten, poor Swann himself will be labeled a "vile creature" by a third party, Mme. Verdurin, upset at his possessive streak in regard to Odette.  This situation provides the narrator with an opportunity to reflect on the two characters' defensive need to justify themselves with "the same words which the last twitches of an inoffensive animal in its death throes wring from the countryman who is killing it"--and, by extension, to compare Swann's fate in love with that of the chicken's.  Just brutal!  In the second instance I wanted to talk about, the narrator finds a unique way to comment on the strange ways of his class by developing a parallel--this one some 50 pages apart--between the actions of a certain M. Vinteuil and the behavior of his daughter soon after his death.  While I can't hope to do justice to the exquisiteness of the joke, the humor revolves around M. Vinteuil's strategic positioning of a piece of music on the piano just prior to the arrival of the narrator's family (he wants to be recognized for his musical talents while simultaneously affecting to be too modest to acknowledge them) and the daughter's parallel placement of a photo of her deceased father on a table in the piano room as she hears the sound of an approaching carriage bearing her lesbian lover. "Oh!  That picture of my father is looking at us.  I don't know who could have put it there.  I've told them a dozen times that it doesn't belong there,"  Mlle. Vinteuil showily feigns, inducing a confession from "her friend" that she'd like to spit on the portrait of "the ugly old monkey" (165-167).  The extended joke, not to put too fine a spin on it, is typical of Proust's pattern of finding humor in the weakest human frailties and propensities for deceit.

As for Proust's all-enveloping prose, that's thankfully "all too typical" of the novelist as well.  In a work in which various places and objects--churches and the countryside in Combray, the Bois de Boulogne and the Champs-Élysées in Paris, and most famously the taste of a humble madeleine dipped in lime-blossom tea--trigger powerful memories of the past and lead to meditations upon how our memories of the past interact with and transform the present, some of the most affecting writing within the entire novel concerns the narrator's youthful love of hawthorns.  I love, for example, the exuberance and the extravagance of this recollection of a pink hawthorn pointed out to the narrator by his grandfather: "Inserted into the hedge, but as different from it as a young girl in a party dress among people in everyday clothes who are staying at home, the shrub was all ready for Mary's month, and seemed to form a part of it already, shining there, smiling in its fresh pink outfit, catholic and delicious" (143).  So, so poetic, no?  And I'm basically reduced to tears whenever I reread the young Marcel's farewell to the hawthorns, the precise moment where he talks about "putting my arms around the prickly branches," prior to his family's unexpectedly early return to Paris one year.

My mother was not moved by my tears, but she could not suppress a cry at the sight of my crushed hat and ruined coat.  I did not hear it:  "Oh, my poor little hawthorns," I said weeping, "you're not the ones trying to make me unhappy, you aren't forcing me to leave.  You've never hurt me!  So I will always love you.  And drying my tears, I promised them that when I was grown up I would not let my life be like the senseless lives of other men and that even in Paris, on spring days, instead of paying calls and listening to silly talk, I would go out into the countryside to see the first hawthorns (148).

Given the narrator's association of hawthorns with the human and non-human symbols of his childhood past, has there ever been a better evocation of the innocence of youth paired with a foreshadowing of the loss of the young self to be found in adulthood?  If so, I'd sure like to hear about it.  In the meantime, even though it's early in the year, I suspect that I've finally found another title to add to my all-time favorites list.  Absolutely brilliant and maybe even worth a good cry for all you sentimental types out there.  (http://www.penguinclassics.com/)

Marcel Proust

Sodom and Gomorrah

Sodom and Gomorrah [Sodome et Gomorrhe] (Penguin, 2005)
by Marcel Proust (translated from the French by John Sturrock)
France, 1921-1922

Having learned what he wanted, M. de Charlus pretended to despise Bloch.  "How ghastly!" he exclaimed, restoring to his voice all its clarion vigor.  "All the localities or properties called 'La Commanderie' were built or owned  by the Knights of the Order of Malta (of whom I am one), just as the places known as 'Le Temple' or 'La Cavalerie' were by the Templars.  Were I staying at La Commanderie, nothing could be more natural.  But a Jew!  Not, however, that it surprises me; it comes from a curious liking for sacrilege, peculiar to that race.  As soon as a Jew has enough money to buy a château, he always chooses one called Le Prieuré, L'Abbaye, Le Monastère, La Maison-Dieu.  I had dealings with a Jewish functionary, can you guess where he resided?  In Pont l'Évêque.  Having fallen out of favor, he got himself sent to Brittany, to Pont l'Abbé.  When, in Holy Week, they put on those indecent spectacles known as Passion plays, half the auditorium is filled with Jews, exulting at the thought that they are going to put Christ on the cross for a second time, at least in effigy.  At the Lamoureux concerts, I had for my neighbor one day a rich Jewish banker.  They were giving Berlioz's L'Enfance du Christ; he was appalled.  But he soon recovered the beatific expression that is usual with him on hearing 'L'Enchantement du Vendredi Saint.'  Your friend is staying at La Commanderie, the wretch!  What sadism!  You must show me how to get there,"  he added, resuming his indifferent air, "so that I can go one day and see  how our ancient domains are withstanding such a profanation.  It's unfortunate, for he's polite, he seems clever.  All he needs now is to live in Paris on the rue du Temple!"  With these words, M. de Charlus seemed simply to be looking for a fresh example by which to support his theory; but in reality he was posing a question whose intention was twofold, the principal one being to learn Bloch's address.  (Sodom and Gomorrah [translated by John Sturrock], 489)

Whilst I'll admit that dropping myself into the middle of Proust's In Search of Lost Time with no previous exposure to the earlier three volumes in the work prob. wasn't the smartest thing I've ever done, I so enjoyed Sodom and Gomorrah after the good couple of hundred of pages or so it took me to settle into its groove that the in media res entry point definitely wasn't the dumbest thing ever either.  Ostensibly a meditation on same sex love in an era when that was still considered a vice in la Douce France, I think it's fair to say the novel is just as much concerned with hypocrisy in general and the variety of masks required to fully participate in society's non-sexual games.  Deception--and particularly self-deception--is the real subject of the "voyeuristic" close-up here, played out in a slow motion storytelling style that will well reward your patience if you give it half a chance.  What do I mean?  Not to be a whiner about it or anything, but nobody ever told me how funny Proust was before--how his celebrated psychological insights often come accompanied with a snifter of world class cattiness in tow!  While the anti-Semitic set piece above is entirely typical in suggesting that being born Jewish in the wake of the Dreyfus Affair was as big a shortcoming as being born gay or being born poor on the sliding scale of the snobby socialites in the novel, note the wonderfully-observed manner in which the narrator communicates that he's aware that the pompous Baron de Charlus' tirade is partially a cover story to mask the closeted character's interest in a potential illicit love interest.  Elsewhere, Proust was a continual revelation to me less for his humor or his subtle ironies than for his ability to combine an OCD level of detail with some surprising insight into his characters' personalities or upbringing.  Remarking on M. de Charlus' laugh at one point, for example, the narrator remarks that the laugh "had probably come down to him from some Bavarian or Lorraine grandmother, who had herself got the identical laugh from one of her forebears, so that it had been ringing out like this, unchanged, for a good few centuries in the lesser courts of old Europe, and its precious quality had been enjoyed, like that of certain old musical instruments now grown very uncommon" (332).  Just a few pages later, the narrator brings another old money character to life by describing her as a remnant of "the epoch when people of breeding observed the rule of being agreeable and the so-called rule of the three adjectives" (335).  I was tickled by the explanation of the latter rule:

Mme de Cambremer combined the two.  One laudatory adjective was not enough for her; she would follow it (after a dash) by a second, then (after a second dash) by a third.  But what was peculiar to her is that, contrary to the social and literary objective she had set herself, in Mme de Cambremer's letters the sequence of the three epithets wore the aspect, not of a progression, but of a diminuendo.  Mme de Cambremer told me in this first letter that she had met Saint-Loup and had appreciated more than ever his "unique-rare-real" qualities, and that he was due to return with one of his friends (the one, indeed, who was in love with the daughter-in-law), and that, if I cared to come, with or without them, to dinner at Féterne, she would be "overjoyed-happy-pleased."  Perhaps it was because the desire to be agreeable was not matched in her by any fertility of imagination or richness of vocabulary that, eager to utter three exclamations, this lady had the resources to provide in the second and third only an enfeebled echo of the first.  There need only have been a fourth adjective for nothing to have remained of her initial affability (335-336).

For anyone who's ever suffered through a poorly-constructed blog post praising or berating some lesser-tier writer, suffice it to say that the astounding level of detail in moments like Proust's diminuendo digression is the sort of thing that will make it all worthwhile!  And moments like these, while likely old hat to In Search of Lost Time veterans, frankly litter the work in question.  That the narrator, so observant in the ways of others, is himself guilty of a very human self-deception when it comes to his own love life and his feelings for the suspected lesbian Albertine, naturally makes me eager to see what happens to him and his loved one next.  In the meantime, I believe I have some catching up to do first: thanks and no thanks to book gangsta Frances of Nonsuch Book, whose encouragement of me to join her little In Search of Lost Time shared read mid-stride has added another 3,000 pages of reading to my TBR now that M. Proust has lived up to the hype yet once again!   (http://www.penguinclassics.com/)

Marcel Proust