Last week, on a road trip, I thought, “I am turning 43 on Monday and I have never read Proust” So I Googled “which Proust to start with” and the internet told me that Swann in Love is the place to start.
This novella can stand alone, but it is actually a section of Swann’s Way, which in turn is the first volume of Proust’s famous In Search of Lost Time. The plot is pretty straightforward: Swann, a high society bougie fellow in fin-de-siecle Paris, falls in love with Odette, a courtesan. While there is a narrative with a beginning, middle and end, it’s predominantly an exploration of the emotional turmoil of love/obsession/jealousy. There is a lot of musing on love, music, art, as we explore Swann’s emotional states.
If you, like me, love a turn of phrase that gets right to the heart of an emotional state, Proust may be your guy! I love it when an author can pinpoint a universal emotion/tension/contradiction/impulse and describe it in an instantly recognizable way. This book is like, 90% that. It also has some nice little glimpses into bougie Parisian life of 1913, and several really wonderful passages about music and what it does to/for us. I liked how Swann and Odette are slowly revealed to be kind of sniveling and vulgar, respectively, and yet the portrayal of their emotions and instincts remain relatable and universal. Swann’s jealous impulses are so, so poignant for anyone who has ever asked a question even though you knew that the answer was absolutely going to break your heart in new, unexpected ways.
I just re-read The Great Gatsby and couldn’t help but think that our two protagonists should have a drink together. Both men want a woman who ultimately can’t/won’t choose them; both are in love with the idea of the woman over the actual woman; both are intimately acquainted with the trappings of high society. There was even a paragraph where Swann muses that after he kisses Odette, she will never not have been kissed by him; Gatsby does the same with Daisy (“He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God.”)
Anyway, someone should definitely write that essay and in the meanwhile, let’s look at some of my favorite quotes.
On being surprised that your lover also contains multitudes:
Like many people, Swann had a lazy mind and lacked imagination. He knew very well as a general truth that people’s lives are full of contrasts, but for each particular individual he imagined the part of his or her life of which he knew nothing as being identical to the part he knew. He imagined what he was not told on the basis of what he was told. (pg. 160)
I know you know this lady:
Madame de Gallardon, who could never prevent herself from sacrificing her highest social ambitions, and her hope of one day dazzling the world, to the immediate, obscure, and private pleasure of saying something disagreeable…(pg. 138)
On feeling sorry for oneself:
But ever since Swann had become so melancholy, always in the tremulous state that precedes tears, he felt the same need to talk about his suffering as a murderer has to talk about his crime. (pg. 144)
On the impossibility of objectivity:
…a depraved person, always affecting the same virtue in the eyes of the people by whom he does not want his vices to be suspected, has no gauge by which to recognize how far those vices, whose continuous growth is imperceptible to himself, are gradually drawing him away from normal ways of living. (Pg 169)
And my favorite of the lot; relatable:
Dr Cottard was never quite sure of the tone he should adopt in response to anyone who addressed him, whether his interlocutor wanted to make a joke or was serious. And so, as a precautionary measure, he would add to each of his facial expressions the offer of a conditional and tentative smile whose anticipatory subtlety would exculpate him from the charge of simple-mindedness, if the remark made to him turned out to have been facetious. But since he also had to take the opposite possibility into account, and could not dare to allow this smile to settle clearly on his face, one saw floating over his features a perpetual uncertainty in which could be read the question he never dared to ask: ‘Do you really mean that?’ (pg. 14)
Tl;dr: dating and social anxieties are timeless.
I am glad I read this; I am also glad it was only 180 pages. Even such a short book, though, dragged in the middle when Swann obstinately refused to see that Odette was just not that into him. I do not feel a need to read more Proust, although I might look up the famous Madeleine passage. I do recommend this for those who want to see what Proust is all about–or who need a little reassurance that the human heart is the same as it ever was.