I was a bit worried at first because the first section I found a bit tedious, although according to the intro it is not always included in published versions of the book. I'm glad it was if only for some things that are important for later references. But once the book breaks through into the first World War and afterwards it is back to everything I want from Proust. In the last half, another party that somehow goes on for two hundred pages, but without causing frustrating, I wondered if Proust was maybe being too tidy in telling us what happened to every single person who had appeared over the seven volumes. I think a few short sections could have been dropped. But ultimately it is a powerful reflection on aging and the ways people and our perceptions of them change, and of the specter of death.

I do wish I could rate the series as a whole separately, because I'd give it 5 stars. Proust's prose has been like a comfy blanket every time I settled into another volume, and I'm grateful to have experienced the full set in all of its best and worst parts.

My clearest memory of reading Swann's Way consists of pouring over one of the large illustrations, softly colored and darkly lit and so much more interesting than the Biomaterials lecture I was sitting in, an aisle-edged seat that necessitated swift cover ups from the professor's gaze as well as ensured a swift getaway at the ring of the bell. Now, I am at the close of eleven months on, more than three hundred miles away from the beginning and likely to never join in on such a high and mighty science lecture ever again. Older, and wiser, I would hope, but as the latter lacks as much concreteness that stuffs the former to a painfully nostalgic brim, I will leave it to others to determine that particular note.

I had been wondering whether I would need two reviews, one for the parcel and one for the whole, but this is Proust. Forty two hundred pages and counting, an author that died before the work had ripened into a fully snipped and spliced together piece, and still it all comes together. The color, the music, the people, the literature, the feverish thralls of machinated society culminating at long last in war, Paris' own Pompeii. And Time. Always Time.

I will still put something down for the megalodon of the complete edition, but later, I think. I think, in that I will leave it to Time to determine whether it is truly necessary or right to an attempt an encompassing of my first experience in Searching for Lost Time, a Time spent alongside my own Time so full of turmoil, temperament, and translation. French and I did not part on the best of terms after so many years of it being just another grindstone for my unwilling youth, but I still remember. And after this work, I begin to wonder, if it would not perhaps be worth it. For Le deuxième sexe, for Les Misérables, for this. That question I will leave to Time as well, for unlike the narrator finally embarking on his composition at the end of so many pages, that I have in plenty.

I didn't used to think so. Decide your career at 17, obtain a career at 21, work at said career for the rest of your life. It wasn't so long ago that books seemed the only future left to my own true volition, and I still find myself speeding ahead into the void if I'm not too careful. The thing about writing is the cultivation of it; a reading here, a friendship there, a life that does not require a filled résumé to be worthy of script. The path I am walking now is slower, but surer, and the beauty found in its natural growth of passionate productivity is all its own. I am not so set in the concept of interchangeability of people and places as Proust, but I do see the wisdom in living for the sake of living, letting the gardens grow without worrying too much about the resulting opus.

If you wish to write: read, watch, listen, think, live. A piece here, a piece there, when the spirit takes you. Look for beauty, look for hypocrisy, look for the intersection of details in reality, memory, and iridescent mist that lies between. Mind your illusions, but also love them, for as long as you are able. Find your niche, pursue your instincts, and no one will be able to say that your Time has been wasted. Every so often, cast your line back, far back into that cloaking brilliance and those soft-edged shadows, and wonder.

Fragments of existence withdrawn from Time: these then were perhaps what the being three times, four times brought back to life within me had just now tasted, but the contemplation, though it was of eternity, had been fugitive. And yet I was vaguely aware that the pleasure which this contemplation had, at rare intervals, given me in my life, was the only genuine and fruitful pleasure that I had known.

I do not agree with everything Proust has said, but what I do is of immense value and phenomenal insight. I do not view my loves the way Proust did, but much of it I recognize in parts of pain and parcels of profundity, and will color my effects forever on. Ever so often I snorted and sneered at his pompous pratfalls, and more times than I can count was I lost in a rapture of sight, of sound, of trains of lines of letters flitting this way and that over coursing streams of thought and form and sometimes, sometimes, the very soul of a name, a place, a pleasure. I have spent a longer length of effort in his pages than I have with any other author, a plunge that was in no way previously prepared for to any practical extent. Fifteen hundred and fifty-six people there are now in '2013: The Year of Reading Proust' group, and the percent I've interacted with is a mere smidgen of a handful of a precious few. I am a poor player in the daily discussion realm, but I do hope that my small contribution of reviews have helped.

Thank you, Proustitute, for your leadership as both coordinator and titular figurehead of the most witty sort. Thank you Kalliope, Aloha, Kris, for your efforts within the group as well as without. Thank you one and all for every like, every comment, every spur onward towards this final conclusion, the culminating finality of the first journey through word, through page, through volume, through Proust. Much has changed since that first library check out of that first ponderous edition, and much remains the same. The entirety of all that is what this reading experience has given me, that which will play out for the rest of my days as both influence and insight and whatever saying that one has read the entirety of ISoLT is worth in the world these days. Not much to most, quite a bit to those who count, and most importantly, however I see fit to me. And I see fit to value it very, very much.

I know that I am far too quick in my finishing for most, so for those in the midst, those in the beginning, those on the cusp of finishing, those who have finished within the last month or so and still bear the flitting of certain pages on the borders of that electric spitfire of the brain, those who made their last way long ago enough to be thinking on another journey. Those who are halted partway, those who view with trepidation, those who have yet to come. Good luck, good reading, good living. Come for the reputation, come for the incentive, come for the love of others past, present, future. Proust is not perfect, but by god he is something special.

Sweet Sunday afternoons, beneath the chestnut-tree in our Combray garden, from which I was careful to eliminate every commonplace incident of my actual life, replacing them by a career of strange adventures and ambitions in a land watered by living streams, you still recall those adventures and ambitions to my mind when I think of you, and you embody and preserve them by virtue of having little by little drawn round and enclosed them (which I went on with my book and the heat of the day declined) in the gradual crystallization, slowly altering in form and dappled with a pattern of chestnut-leaves, of your silent, sonorous, fragrant, limpid hours.

-Swann's Way

Adieu, Marcel Proust, adieu. Till we meet again.

Drie jaar geleden begon ik aan Op zoek naar de verloren tijd, het zevendelige werk van Marcel Proust (1871-1922) dat volgens zovelen tot de top van de wereldliteratuur behoort. Waar ik aanvankelijk moeite had met de lijzige stijl van de schrijver, werd ik gaandeweg gegrepen door de proustiaanse beau monde met zijn wonderlijke figuren. In delen 5 en 6, [b:De gevangene|42744230|De gevangene (Op zoek naar de verloren tijd, #5)|Marcel Proust|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1541852887l/42744230._SY75_.jpg|87867407] en [b:De voortvluchtige|44574484|De voortvluchtige (Marcel Proust - Op zoek naar de verloren tijd Book 6)|Marcel Proust|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1553338608l/44574484._SY75_.jpg|2331440], riep de hoofdpersoon daarentegen steeds meer weerzin op met zijn kinderlijke trekken om de mensen om hem heen te manipuleren en beoordelen.

Het laatste deel in de reeks, De tijd hervonden, is wat dat betreft gelukkig milder: ditmaal blikt Marcel vooral terug op zijn leven in de gegoede Parijse kringen, terwijl hij mijmert over de betekenis van kunst en zijn schrijverschap.

[...] iets dat wij in een bepaalde periode gezien hebben, een boek dat wij toen lazen, blijft niet alleen voorgoed verbonden met wat zich om ons heen bevond, dat blijft het getrouw ook met degene die wij toen waren, het kan alleen nog opnieuw gevoeld, opnieuw gedacht worden door de gevoeligheid, door de denkwijze, door de persoon van destijds [...]

Het verhaal is in dit deel secundair aan de beschouwingen. Tegen de achtergrond van de Eerste Wereldoorlog en anti-Duitse sentimenten steelt baron De Charlus opnieuw de show met zijn ‘rouw’ om de “Parijzenaartjes” die aan het front sneuvelen - is een stad die geen mooie mannen meer zal hebben niet als een stad waar alle beeldhouwkunst aan stukken is?

Proust schrijft mooi en gedetailleerd, al vond ik zijn passages vaak langdradig en de overgangen tussen de onderwerpen wat al te willekeurig. In de passages over ouderdom en het passeren van de tijd komt het werk tot een climax. De schrijver ontmaskert zijn hoofdpersoon als een ‘alwetende verteller’, die meer observeert dan meegaat in zijn wereld, al getuigt zijn fascinatie voor zijn omgeving er naar mijn idee juist ook van hoezeer hij daarmee nog bezig is.

Zo hadden in de faubourg Saint-Germain die ogenschijnlijk onneembare posities [...] hun onschendbaarheid verloren, zoals er allerlei verandert in deze wereld, door de werking van een innerlijk beginsel waar men niet aan had gedacht: bij M. de Charlus de liefde voor Charlie die hem tot slaaf van de Verdurins had gemaakt [...] bij Mme de Guermantes een hang naar het nieuwe en naar kunst; bij M. de Guermantes een exclusieve liefde zoals hij er in zijn leven al soortgelijke had gehad, maar die de zwakheid van zijn hoge leeftijd tirannieker maakte, en waarvan de zwakheden [...] niet meer maatschappelijk goedgemaakt werden.

Op zoek naar manieren om de tijd te vangen - de madeleine komt weer om de hoek kijken - lijkt Proust zich in De tijd hervonden ook af te vragen waartoe het eigenlijk allemaal deed.

In het geval van bekende mannen hielp wat zij achterlieten als zij stierven nog herinneren aan het feit dat hun bestaan was afgelopen. Maar wat gewone hoogbejaarde societymensen betrof hield men niet goed meer uit elkaar of zij al dan niet dood waren, niet alleen doordat men hun verleden slecht kende of vergeten was, maar ook doordat zij hoegenaamd niets met de toekomst van doen hadden.

Proust liet in elk geval een indrukwekkend oeuvre achter, dat ik met een decennia of wat graag herlees.

I can barely express the depth of my connection to this series, other than to say it is the finest, most moving and powerful piece of art I've ever experienced. The final volume clarifies both Proust's intentions and his mighty handlings of time, memory and loss. As Proust might say: within one man's life are all men's lives.

In Search of Lost Time in the literary work that has motivated me to perform more self introspection, both while reading as well as when the covers of the books were closed, than any book I have ever read. Proust developed dozens and dozens of great characters, opens himself interiorly sharing his deepest thoughts and emotions, and examines some of the major life questions. This secular book filled with jealousy, lust, and insecurity is transcendental and mystical. Time Regained is a great conclusion to one of the greatest novels of all time.

I'll certainly have to revisit the ending of Time Regained since I finished it sick and a little bit delirious, but I'm not exaggerating when I say that In Search of Lost Time has profoundly touched me, has changed me in some ways. It became my summer obsession and I talked my mom's ear off about Proust and ISLT, something I feel like Proust would've done too if he were not the author. Of course, this is survivorship bias, and I would not have followed through to the end if I did not feel some personal connection in the beginning.

ISLT is a wonderful example of it's own message about involuntary memory-- I find myself thinking Wow, this is what Proust wrote about in the episode where... and I think these reflections make life more full. So much of ISLT is mundane, but Proust's sensitive, humorous, often telling of his strangeness style exalts even the most usual circumstance. It makes even Belle Epoque France seem like something intimately familiar.

I will allow some time to pass, but I definitely want to reread Proust in 5-10 when I'm older and can add to the reflections I've already begun to form.

This 5 star rating is more for the entire series, but it also works well for this book, which is a stunning conclusion to Proust's masterpiece. The previous volumes were packed to overflowing with petty bickering, classist bullshit and snobbery, and I'm pleased to report that we get more of the same here, with some of the bitterness amped way the hell up. M. de Charlus has been a favorite character of mine throughout the series, and his downfall is both depressing and richly deserved. Also, people keel over left and right, faces become cracked with age, flesh becomes either loose or plump, and in general bodies start falling apart both due to the war and because of the passage of time. We get more of Proust's long philosophical digressions on art, and by the end you feel like you've gotten to know these people intimately and lived a full life with them. No one is really "redeemed" here, and people remain persnickety pricks, but Christ, what a beautiful series of books. And now, after years and years of having it on my "to read" list, I can finally say I finished it. I feel like having a drink to celebrate.

Finding Time Again is a wonderfully fitting end to the longest, and one of the most beautiful, of all European novels. Since the whole thing begins with the struggle to remember and write the text that we're reading, it seemed fitting that the last social encounter, back to the Germantes (whose various social threads have now all grown together through marriage, death, and re-marriage), leads the narrator to the revelation regarding age, memory, time, and art, that inspired him to try what he began accomplishing back on the first page of The Way by Swann's. The roads metaphor that I invoked, nearly two years ago now, when I finished reading that first volume, is finally made explicit in the literary essay that crowns the work here in its final pages--the long meandering roads of our life all lead to oblivion. The artist gains some consolation--and something to do with his dotage--if he charts them with words.

I feel like I'm saying the obvious. And yet, Proust's novel is obvious. It's not a part of the Modernist technique, I don't find, despite the first person narrator--not a lot of symbolism, or seriousness, but it speaks through a rather more post-modern (if you will) superficiality and obviousness. The beauty of it lies in how it lays bare the mind at work churning reality through its processes of intake, impression, rumination, constantly at war with itself between raw feeling--jealousy and desire mainly--and the logical demands of thought, action, and propriety. Of course high society is the perfect setting for such a character and theme, but perhaps it's rather the other way around--that high society created such a man, his memory, his struggles, and his book that could only chart the situation that it created inside him. At any rate, there he is, in all his nudity and nuance, a long series of events, interpretations, passions, actions, and the beautifully desperate attempt, through memory and words, to chart them like a series of meandering paths through the countryside that always bring one back, at end of day, home, to the point of departure, to death that is a return to birth.

If the volumes in the middle had been this engaging, I would have been thrilled. The first and last books in this novel are far and away the best.