Don’t forget the Hawthorns…

I’ve climbed a few literary mountains in my time (Ulysses, War and Peace, Don Quixote, A Suitable Boy, Buddenbrooks…), but I always thought that the one I was working towards, a more literal literary mountain, was Thomas Mann’s Der Zauberberg (The Magic Mountain), a thousand-page monster to be read in German.  However, I’ve come to realise that I’m actually in the middle of a far more ambitious project, one which will probably take me a good while to complete…

Last year, I read Du côté de chez Swann (Swann’s Way), the first part of Marcel Proust’s seven-volume epic, À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time).  It was my first encounter with Proust and his masterpiece, and it was certainly, ahem, an experience.  For those of you who have never tried his work, it’s a fairly difficult job to describe how it reads.  Simply put, this is not writing for those who enjoy plot-driven novels (or anyone who likes things to, well, actually happen over the course of a book).

Sadly, I was in the middle of one of my infrequent injury-related blogging slumps at the time, so I didn’t actually review the book.  However, I do recall posting a summary in four tweets, which went something like this:

Part One – Man remembers his childhood in the country.  Eats a cake and has flashbacks.
Part Two – Walks in the countryside, long descriptions of churches. Hawthorns, don’t forget the hawthorns…
Part Three – Long, seemingly irrelevant, story about a family friend’s love-life: am assured this will eventually become relevant. 
Part Four – Boy plays with pretty girl in Paris.  She goes on holiday, he’s too sick to travel.  Fin 😦

At which point, most people will be looking for something a little more action-packed to peruse…

*****
Of course, there is a lot more to  À la recherche du temps perdu than that.  The destination is of relatively little importance – it’s the journey which makes it a great book.  Proust’s writing is unlike anything I had previously encountered, a mesmerising, minutely-descriptive avalanche of words (although ‘glacier’ might be a more fitting choice here) – phrase after phrase, sentence upon sentence, paragraph after paragraph, pages of hypnotic prose, drawing the helpless reader ever further into Marcel’s world.

What begins as something akin to watching paint dry (and each time you pick up the book, this feeling is still there at the back of your mind), ends with the reader becoming completely absorbed with the text, forgetting the world outside, fascinated by… something which described in fewer words would probably not be that interesting.

In a way, it’s a literary gamble, a game of novelistic chicken – the writer slows time down to such an extent that the reader has only two choices: to get out of the way and stop reading, or give in to the relentless, gentle flow of description and sensation.  The kind of reader you are will probably determine which choice you make.  Either way, you know that Proust isn’t going to blink first…

*****
Despite some of my comments above, I always intended to continue with the novel, and I finally got around to making time for the second part of the story, À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs (In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower).  Marcel (the narrator, not the writer) is now a teenager living in Paris, and the first half of the book describes his first love, the slightly ambiguous relationship he has with Gilberte Swann (the daughter of the family friend whose love-life is dissected in painful detail in the first book).  Once this affair has run its course, Marcel then spends a few months in the country, where he makes friends with Robert de Saint-Loup, an aristocratic soldier, and Elstir, a famous artist, before finally meeting Albertine Simonet, a young girl who (if the titles of the later volumes are anything to go by) will become very close to young Marcel…

Once again, the reader experiences the story through the filter of Marcel’s memories and thoughts, leaving us to follow events at the languid pace he chooses to unroll them at.  The whole book is written in beautiful, rolling waves of language, which you cannot help but admire.  When I was able to sit down and give myself the time to enjoy it, I did so thoroughly.  However…

…if you’re looking for a sympathetic narrator, Marcel ain’t it.  One of the things which detracted a little from my enjoyment of À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs was how utterly spoiled and incomprehensible he could be at times.  The story is being told by old Marcel, looking back at his youth, explaining his childhood memories (which, of course, have been coloured by time) in the language of a mature, intelligent writer, and you have to wonder if he is deliberately making his younger self look ridiculous.  When Gilberte appears to tire of him, he decides not to see her any more (while still visiting her mother while she’s out…), hoping in some way to make her come back to him by doing nothing at all.  He says:

Je pleurais mais je trouvais le courage, je connaissais la douceur, de sacrifier le bonheur d’être auprès d’elle à la possibilité de lui paraître agréable un jour, un jour où, hélas! lui paraître agréable me serait indifférent.

I cried, but I found strength, I recognised the sweetness of sacrificing the happiness of being close to her for the possibility of her liking me again one day, a day when, alas! I would be completely indifferent to the idea of her liking me. (My translation)

In fact, without insights from anyone slightly less biased than Marcel himself, it is extremely difficult to warm to him at all.  Despite the fact that everyone he meets seems to recognise him as a superior being from the offset, the reader would struggle to find any justification for this from the text.  He appears to be a spoiled, weak, sickly, selfish brat (yep, a teenager), yet famous artists, soldiers and beautiful young women seem to be falling over themselves for the pleasure of making his acquaintance.  His family must be very rich…

Still, the writing makes up for it.  Forgive me if I don’t provide more examples of it here;  the reason for this (apart from the fact that I’m too lazy to find and copy the appropriate passages – and then translate them too…) is that Proust isn’t about the odd pithy sentence, or a telling paragraph here and there.  His work is about the cumulative effect of hundreds of thousands of words perfectly placed to create a whole much greater than the sum of its parts.  And if that doesn’t sound like your cup of tea…

*****
So I’ll keep going with À la recherche du temps perdu, albeit at a fairly slow rate of knots (which is probably highly appropriate), but before I leave you, I thought I’d just finish with a note on how I’m reading it.  As you may have suspected, I’m reading it in French, which may account for some of the problems I’ve had with it.  I am always torn when reading French-language novels, as my ability in the language is such that reading books in the original is possible (and usually enjoyable) but not always that easy, leaving me to wonder whether it might be acceptable to take the easy option and read an English translation instead…

It’s a moral dilemma (one I don’t really have in German, which I read much more fluently), especially as the more often I give in, the less likely I am to ever read anything in French in the future.  It’s a matter of weighing up the choices, deciding whether the opportunity of reading the writer’s own words is more important than getting every nuance of a recreation of the original.  In the end, I decided that I would go for the French, despite the many drawbacks this entails.  I’m not sure if it’s the right decision, but it’s one I’m happy with – for the moment at least 🙂