In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower

I ve long debated with myself and friends the actual benefits of re reading versus a fresh read of a new book Would re reading really bring me a considerable number of new reflections, ideas and opinions to add to the first impressions I ve gathered on my first read And wouldn t this time spent on this repeated task be better employed by reading a completely different book that would instead and therefore give me completely different reflections on different subjects I perhaps haven t touched ye [...]

The only book I ve ever abandoned after the first sentence.And what a sentence But I ll come back to that Let me first hasten to defend myself, to present my credentials, because I realise that Proust is held in such high esteem as to be almost beyond criticism not in the real world of course, that would be ridiculous, but on certainly Of the 29 friends who have rated this, 25 give it five stars, three give it four stars one the only French reader gives it three That is an astonishingly high pro [...]

A Note about the TranslationI wanted to support the translation of this volume by James Grieve, a lecturer at my alma mater, Australian National University, when I was there in the 70 s.I m pretty sure he taught two of my close friends While I can t recall meeting him, I did socialise with one of his colleagues, Robert Dessaix, who subsequently became a talented writer It was a very capable French Department However, in the 90 s, it was decimated by budget cuts and Grieve was made redundant He s [...]

L OMBRE de la REPR SENTATIONOn my review of Du c t de chez Swann I had concentrated on the pre eminence of the visual The careful attention paid by Proust to light, to colour, to objects that add colour such as flowers, and to painting and the visual arts in general, led me to conceive of his art as painterly writing All those elements continue in this second volume I could easily select another rich sample of quotes that would illustrate this visual nature Indeed, sight is explicitly designated [...]

.

There s a lot of stuff in Volume 2 of A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu, and people see different things in it To me, though, the unifying theme is a continuation of Proust s analysis of how romantic relationships work, which he started in Un Amour de Swann There, he examined one particular kind of relationship Swann spends a fair amount of time with Odette, who is very nice to him and keeps saying how she wishes she could see him often Without realizing it, he comes to rely on her always to be the [...]

sorry, david this book is better than swann s way to the extent that i may have to go back and give swann s way three stars so that when i give this book four stars it doesn t make them equals, and, having four books to go, i want to leave room for a five star anticipation the first half of swann s way had me understanding what people did not like about proust there was a lot of me hating on the narrator and gacking over his precious daintiness this one, though, phoar it is true it took me a lon [...]

685 Remembrance of Things Past Marcel Proust la recherche du temps perdu II l ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs la recherche du temps perdu 2 In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower In Search of Lost Time, 2 , Marcel Proust 1372 9643052176 1385 20 1 2

WHY Or The Brain on ProustThere s a group of 7 ladies I ve known for quite some time We meet regularly for afternoon tea, going round turn and turn about, although Barbara has now been excused from hosting in deference to her great seniority and some health issues that come along with the seniority We have nothing in common except that we are all English native speakers, living here in Germany, and all of us married at one time or another to German husbands So it s only the language that connect [...]

Adolescent AestheticsThe temptation to compare Philip Roth and Marcel Proust is one I can t resist Both Goodbye Columbus and Portnoy s Complaint seem to me inverted interpretations of Proust s Within the Budding Grove Using the same technique of relentless interior monologue, all are coming of age novels featuring sex, taste of one kind or another, and social class set against a background of contemporary manners and Jewish assimilation All three books assay the problems of male adolescence horm [...]

An Open Letter to Marcel Proust Sir, thank you for having written what must be known only as one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century a work of genius.Unfortunately, this letter cannot be a letter of exaltation, but a rather a letter of apology You deserve all the adulation which you have received these past 100 years since the first volume of your novel was published And the Proust group on is testimony to the faith which you have properly placed in your readers abilities to not sett [...]

Our desires cut across one another, and in this confused existence it is rare for happiness to coincide with the desire that clamoured for it Marcel Proust, Within a Budding GroveMarie Laurencin, Les jeunes filles My first recommendation when reading Proust is the reader MUST make sure they have a reliable bookmark, because when not if, but when you lose your place your faulty memory will not be able to remember exactly where you just were One young nubile girl starts to blend into another young [...]

Beauty is truth, truth beauty John KeatsLet us first treat this as a premise, a maxim if you will, this quote from a long dead poet with a penchant for ancient pottery Then, let us strip whatever meaning that has accrued upon it Whether it resulted from pure instinct or rote memorization, fling it all away, and leave just the words Little as they are, they are than enough.So, beauty is truth, truth beauty Now, what is beauty What is truth We sacrifice to beauty in all its forms, the physical sp [...]

I went to a conference in England recently, a dull and painful conference for work My flight left Jersey at 7am and I had a lengthy train journey to follow Quite accidentally, I got totally hammered on cosmopolitans the night before During the long and humbling expedition, me and my hangover managed to do three things drink tea, eat ready salted Walkers crisps and read Proust Ah, Proust s luscious musical prose was like a soothing balm to my throbbing head The narrator, gentle and captivating, k [...]

In Search of Lost Time, Volume 2 Within a Budding Social Cataloging WebsiteTranslated from the French by J ChabouardI had arrived at a state of almost complete indifference to Gilberte when, two years later, I joined the website Our new teacher for French, Mme Moir, was an avid lover of literature, and she had advised us to each create a virtual account on this so called social cataloging website this year so we would be able to keep track of our books and write our reading journals inside our n [...]

the review is missing below are the comments which followed.David You re wrong that this is better than Swann s Way and you re wrong in calling Proust an anti romantic Try again, jewtard Brian read carefully, gothskimmer i wrote that one could say that proust was anti romantic all i mean is that his extreme nuerosis and need to analyze everything to death does, in a sense, reduce every creature to a thinking machine after hundreds of pages of his wildly in depth analysis i don t feel that In Se [...]

I like to read books about people s fucked up relationships than I like to read about how lovely the flowers smell along the French seaside unless of course the flowers are a blatant euphemism for something else , so I did not end up rating Within a Budding Grove quite as highly as I rated Swann s Way.The first half of the book was great and made true my prediction that the narrator would experience a Swann Odette type of relationship with Gilberte, replete with its ups and downs and its ins an [...]

This second volume within Proust s panorama of self and senses shifts from the inner salons to the outer sea side alcoves and sun drenched hotel lobbies There is an energy and vitality to this second book which is projected through even vivid character portraits and through Proust s evocative expression of his infatuations and obsessions There s a greater sense of space, of terrain and the broader environment For me this seemed to allow the often claustrophobia inducing long winding inner strea [...]

4 and 1 2 starsThis volume started off great for me, but soon became quite repetitive I felt the first section Madame Swann at Home could ve belonged with Swann s Way, though that would ve marred the latter s perfection I later realized the section fits if the arc of this book is the narrator s path from Gilberte to his next love Throughout this section the narrator confesses his love for Gilberte, but what we get are detailed descriptions of Madame Swann I found the relationships of Swann and O [...]

Oh, adolescence Is there any period of time frustrating, conflicting and downright disappointing than that too long span of gawky limbs and endless opportunities for embarrassment When one s body is alien territory, when one is faced with an onslaught of wholly unfamiliar impulses, when the head and the heart and all of the hormones are battling for control over a vessel that just wants things to make the kind of black and white sense they did in the blissfully naive days that are just out of a [...]

Marcel Proust is a writer I completely miss the point of I have no interest in society, especially this dead French one I can t seem to interest myself in these children s parties or these petite bourgeois parents scheming to meet this or that VIP government minister My God, the tedium Yet Tolstoy and Bellow and Ozick and scores of others have all written about particular dead cultures which I ve enjoyed reading about immensely I can t put my finger on it with Proust His inability to involve me [...]

After I finished the first volume of Proust s masterpiece, I did what I always do when I finish a book I wrote a review And, in truth, I ended up being a bit harsh and hyperbolic in that review but I soon came to second guess myself For, although I can t say I exactly loved Swann s Way I liked it , that book had, without my being aware of it, completely undermined everything I thought I knew about fiction Unconsciously, imperceptibly, my whole concept of the novel had changed.So it feels a bit d [...]

What Proust was, and what In Search of Lost Time, when given the proper air and light, the proper attention, can instruct others to be, is an astute pupil of life He was perhaps the most exacting and astute observer in modern literature, and his dedicated readers are, in essence, forced also to become as aware, as exacting, in their own perceptions, not only as they wade the ebb and flow of his tide of words, but beyond that, when the book is closed and put away For as the sound of the ocean and [...]

Back in Paris in the May of the following year, how often I was to buy a sprig of apple from a flower shop, then spend the night hours in the presence of its blossom, which was steeped in the same creamy essence as the frothy dust on the unopened leaf buds Marcel Proust, In the Shadow of Young Girls in FlowerIn Part 1 of Volume 2 of In Search of Lost Time , we meet the narrator, who is now in his early teens and is in love with Gilberte Swann, and is at the same time infatuated with her mother, [...]

Upon checking into a hotel in Venice in the summer of 2006, the man behind the reception desk raised his eyes in surprise when he saw the length of our stay Four nights, he commented Lovely We rarely see people stay for than a couple of nights Most only stay for one Neither my wife nor I had ever been to Venice prior to this trip, and like any other person vaguely familiar with the city, we had a rich imagination of the charms we would behold the canal streets, stripe shirted gondoliers, Piazza [...]

Proust stretches or shrinks time outside of its natural unfolding, and this is undoubtedly what makes it exciting.He can thus fly over weeks in a few lines and dwell on a moment to autopsy on several pages He rewrites the past as if to give it a present consistency, even if all this is only illusion.Proust is a writer for detail, precision almost obsessive at times A precision that we had forgotten, occupied that we are running without seeing, and that we rediscover suddenly in amazement because [...]

A character, the Marquis de Norpois, quotes a fine Arab proverb The dogs may bark the caravan goes on And so the ISoLT saga continues Marcel has a meandering tale to tell and he will take his fine time telling that fall in line or else, vamoose A lot happens in the second book new characters, new themes are introduced Old characters old themes are expanded upon Marcel gets to share the interior lives in the Swann household but can he ever know understand the inner workings of Gilberte Mme Swann [...]

I m certainly no great master of the French language, which must be why I m completely mystified by how A l Ombre des Jeunes Filles en Fleurs translates to Within a Budding Grove.Good thing I have the ever trustworthy C K Scott Moncrieff to translate this all for me AAAAAAGGGHHHHHH I GIVE UP I mean, not permanently, but for now, yeah, I do I give UP I give UP I give up on this Proust I give up despite this recent line I ask you, what in the world can he see in her He must be a bit of a chump whe [...]

In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower In Search of Lost Time, Volume 2 by Marcel Proust is sad to say my first Proust I am happy to say that it will not be my last There is something about French poetry that I find irresistible and in the few French prose books, mostly Hugo, that I have read In this Yale edition, William Cater uses C K Scott Moncrieff s translation and corrects errors in this annotated edition.There is almost a lyrical quality to this work He strode rapidly across the whole wid [...]

Philip Wilson Steer, Young Woman At The Beach A sabedoria n o se recebe, todos temos que a descobrir por n s mesmos, depois de um trajecto que ningu m pode fazer por n s, que ningu m nos pode poupar, porque um ponto de vista sobre as coisas.