# In Search of Lost Time - A Review

CW: Mild (sexual assault, pedophilia, death, abusive relationships)

*In Search of Lost Time*, by Marcel Proust, is one of those books that people like to claim to have read but never did. It, alongside other monoliths of literature such as *Infinite Jest, War and Peace, Atlas Shrugged* and *Worm*, are daunting and enticing in equal measure, constantly hawked by those who proclaim their virtues yet so long that it is unclear whether one has the time to devote to such an undertaking, let alone if it's worth doing so.

But I am a sucker for a hefty tome, and I have been working my way up to *In Search of Lost Time* ever since seeing it, decades back, topping the charts of a now-deleted Wikipedia page for longest novel[^y13si9de2]. I didn't look too much into the book beforehand; all I knew was that it was about French Philosophy and had something to say about nostalgia and memory. I knew it would need some dedicated time to read, so, after graduation and warming up on philosophy with *Simulacra and Simulation*, I took a month off, cancelled all social engagements, retreated to a quiet apartment in the city, and started to read.

I do not recommend doing so.

* * *

*In Search of Lost Time* consists of seven volumes: *Swann's Way*, *Within a Budding Grove*, *The Guermantes Way*, *Sodom and Gomorrah*, *The Prisoner*, *The Fugitive,* and *Time Regained*. Of the seven, I can recommend the first one and a half volumes, and cautiously recommend the second half of the last one, which is the Author Tract that explains his entire philosophy but constantly refers to events that have occurred in the previous five thousand pages, which has a greater impact if you also slogged through those events but honestly you can get the gist of the Tract even without it. It's about nostalgia and memory after all, so all you really have to know is that something happened in the past and the juxtaposition between the past and present and the emotions of the experience and the memories of the experience brings an awareness of the passage of time and makes me feel old.

There was less philosophy than I expected (though being primed by Baudrillard probably didn't help), but given its reputation as a Philosophical Book, one often questions what the author means when he writes about things, and also why the author is choosing to write about these specific things in the first place. The book is styled as a memoir but decidedly fictional, so it's unclear why the Author would include fifty pages on the sex lives of the house servants[^0jw6ov1h6jv8] unless it was to reinforce some theme or other, because the narrator has no business including it in their own memoirs.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

If there's one thing I can praise the book for, it's the prose. The writing is long, meandering, and excessive, often spending five pages to describe the struggle of getting out of bed in the morning[^muphz8for6], but are undeniably expertly crafted, intricate like clockwork, filled to the brim with nestled clauses, digressions, references to events past and future yet to come. Though figuring out what events are actually occurring in the novel may be difficult, it's not the events that matter, and the writing tells you so; it's how the narrator experiences these events, and how they make him feel. We live within the author's head, and the many pages describing the struggles of getting out of bed aren't about the getting out of bed, but the struggles.

Though it is important to note that *In Search of Lost Time* was written in French, and though it could have been an option to me to read it in the original language (the same way that I could have also read *The Three-Body Problem* in the original Chinese), it would have taken me orders of magnitude longer to finish (the same way the prologue of 三体 took me an entire month to read[^07fg56matved]). My copy was the 2016 Moncrieff/Schiff English translation, and with the prose as it is in English, I can imagine how it is in the original French.

Spoilers ahead.

* * *

*Swann's Way* is focused on the narrator's childhood home in Combray, much of it framed around a childhood memory of interrupting a dinner party to ask to be tucked in for the night. This event, and the eventual surrender of his parents to tuck him in and read him a bedtime story, the author blames for his lifelong sickliness and poor constitution. Not because his parents surrendered, but rather it was the first time his parents had acknowledged that he could not go to sleep without being tucked in and told a bedtime story, and this was the first time that his parents had realized that their expectations of him were higher than what he was able to achieve. When we are young we think of ourselves as invincible and capable of anything; but at some point we learn that we are mortal and become aware of our limits; this realization that his parents realized that he had limits (which were lower than what they expected) had been seared into his brain as he returns to Combray many years in the future to reminisce on his memories.

A separate section goes into the entire life and backstory of a guest at the dinner party, M. Charles Swann. Though not at all relevant to the story at the time, it does introduce many major characters and themes that will continue to plague the entire story.

Of note is an attention to social class. As with Tolstoy, the narrator and much of the major characters are of the aristocratic class who don't have real jobs, obtaining a seemingly infinite stream of income from vaguely-defined investments, pensions and inheritances, and spend all their time going to parties and trying to get invites to go to parties. But interestingly, those in the servant class gets much more development, going into some detail about their needs, wants and desires, usually by contrast to the aristocracy. But frustratingly, the book doesn't seem to say anything about this difference, other than acknowledging that it exists, and how the servant's desire to spend time with her daughter is so inconvenient to themselves. The lower class exists, they are different, and (offhandedly) they can be exploited. Perhaps something about love across classes being the same? We'll get to that later.

On a more fun note, the novel takes place in the late 1800s to early 1900s; the story starts with people complaining about motor-cars, with asides to having electricity brought in or trying to get an invite to a house with a telephone as the story goes by. There's also an anachronistic reference to Mendel; though the story frustratingly does not use years (making the age of the narrator in each section difficult to determine), the Dreyfus Affair is a central event around which gossip swirls like water to a drain; with the Dreyfus Affair beginning in 1894 anchoring the story, the rediscovery of Mendel only occurred in 1900, leading to the reference being out of time.[^aq4n9dixo1g]

* * *

At the end of *Swann's Way*, the narrator falls in love with the daughter of M. Swann, Gilberte, and the first half of *Within a Budding Grove* deals with all that. It's a cute young love: they play tennis with chaperones watching, wrestle in the snow, write letters to each other on decorated stationary, the narrator gets invited over for tea. But at some point the narrator spots Gilberte walking with another young man (gasp) and refuses to talk with her unless she apologizes first.[^mr3njhdsts] She never does.

So our narrator, who had recently sold a Chinese Bowl he inherited for ten thousand francs to buy daily flowers for Gilberte, in a fit of sorrow, immediately blows it all on whores.[^nhq7mok1xqi]

It's a relatable section. After all, who among us hasn't fallen in young love, suffered the pains of rejection and heartbreak, and then blown ten thousand francs on hookers and blow? The writing as usual is fantastic as the narrator goes through the highs and lows of love, clinging to every scrap of hope, enwrapped in the folds of paranoia and jealousy at the slightest shadow.

Unfortunately this is the last time the good outweighs the bad, and you can stop reading here. Perhaps it is because I can no relate to the narrator. The narrator develops to become a Romantic, but this manifests itself as "falling in love with every single woman he sees" and "becoming paranoid and jealous over every woman he's with". Those become the dominant themes of the book, and it starts becoming difficult to get through, even with the appreciation for the prose.

The narrator goes on a beach holiday and, on the train, falls in love with a peasant girl selling milk by the side of the tracks. Then he reaches the beach, gets sick, and falls in love with a "beautiful procession of young girls" playing by the beach.

> I felt surging through me the embryo, as vague, as minute, of the desire not to let this girl pass without forcing her mind to become conscious of my person, without preventing her desires from wandering to some one else, without coming to fix myself in her dreams and to seize and occupy her heart.

This is how you get charged with indecent exposure.

Our narrator does not get charged with indecent exposure. He will eventually have a complaint filed against him for "corruption of a child under the age of consent", but it will be dropped because the head of the police "had a weakness for little girls" and advises the narrator to be more careful and that he paid too much.

It's not that bad yet but we're getting there.

I'm skipping many dinner parties and much socialization, because much of it is about the petty infighting high society and their clingers get to, but there's a fun bit where one dinner party group develops halfway into a cult and goes on a one-month sea voyage on a yacht, which gets extended to an entire year because the leader convinces everyone that there's a revolution happening in Paris. Understandable.

Anyways, our narrator gets a piece of advice from M. Swann:

> Nervous men ought always to love, as the lower orders say, ‘beneath’ them, so that their women have a material inducement to do what they tell them.

Yikes. This advice is followed with 

> The danger of that kind of love, however, is that the woman’s subjection calms the man’s jealousy for a time but also makes it more exacting. After a little he will force his mistress to live like one of those prisoners whose cells they keep lighted day and night, to prevent their escaping. And that generally ends in trouble.

The narrator notes that this is prophetic. I also note at this point that Volume 6 is entitled *The Prisoner*.

Our narrator does get in with the group of girls and plays many games with them, and falls in love with one Albertine in particular but also the whole group because he's a Romantic. He gets invited up to Albertine's hotel room but she refuses to kiss him and he does so anyways and she calls for security. Boundaries are established, they remain friends, everyone leaves because summer is over.

* * *

At this point I was having difficulty getting myself to continue reading, so I booked a vacation to the south of France, where God isn't this time of year. I sat on the beaches and read in the sun where there were no girls but many seagulls. I also got food poisoning so there's that.

I'm going to start skimming through the volumes even moreso than I have been previously. *The Guermantes Way* is mostly a bunch of social parties where the narrator falls in love with Princesse de Guermantes mostly because she's a princess and some connection of her name with the book he was read when he was little and couldn't sleep, and stalks her for a bit. But there's a beautiful passage when his grandmother dies and he is overcome by grief. Strong emotions, combined with the prose, are the highlights of the book, but only if one can relate to them.

I thought the title *Sodom and Gomorrah* was metaphorical, but no, it's about the secret homosexual relationships the aristocracy and various servants/staff are having[^fckv5d6jos5]. The narrator pretends to fall in love with Albertine's friend Andrée to get Albertine interested in him, and also starts suspecting that Albertine might be a lesbian (gasp) because she has friends who are girls (gasp). Albertine becomes his mistress[^epffa299hq], and the narrator resolves never to marry her, and then to marry her.

In *The Prisoner*, the narrator and Albertine move in together, and the narrator controls Albertine's movements and keeps her under surveillance to make sure she doesn't meet her girl-friends and go on secret lesbian trysts. But, in fact, the real prisoner is the narrator, who is a prisoner of his own jealousy so who's the real victim here? They fight, and Albertine leaves in the middle of the night.

* * *

In *The Fugitive*, the narrator is distraught by Albertine's departure and writes her a letter saying that he's perfectly fine with her leaving and is going to go marry Andreé instead, while also sending a friend to her house to convince her to come back. He then sends her a letter begging her to come back, but too late! Albertine has died in a freak horse accident[^6tg1tmceimo]. Our narrator receives two posthumous letters from Albertine, one saying good luck with the marriage, the other apologizing and asking to come back.

It's when Albertine leaves our narrator gets entangled with corrupting a child. He's so lonely in his apartment that he pays a little girl to come inside and sit on his knee, but then he realizes that this little girl will never fill the Albertine-shaped hole in his heart and gives the little girl the money to go away, and then the parents find the little girl and ask where the money came from and call the police. At this point I have so little sympathy for our narrator that I start to question whether he's reliable at all, even though so far he seems to be completely truthful and tells us things that make him look like a terrible person. And I start questioning why the Author put this part in the book. There's other parts with little girls in houses of assignation. Maybe it's just the French at the turn of the century.

Anyways our narrator is devastated by the death of his beloved but resigns that love will pass like all previous loves do. He also hires everyone he knows to look into Albertine's past to see if she was actually a lesbian. And now that she's dead, people are more willing to talk.

She was a lesbian. With Andreé. And all the other girls. In fact there's an entire secret lesbian coven operating in France whose goal is to seduce young girls and turn them into lesbians. I'm pretty sure Gilberte was involved because that young man she was walking with? turns out it was France's Most Notorious Lesbian, dressed as a man! (gasp).

* * *

At this point I am as spent as the narrative. I am back in my dark apartment in the city where the sun, like God, refuses to show his face. I am playing *Silksong*. Hornet also has food poisoning.

In *Time Regained* our narrator moves back home and reconnects with Gilberte, who has married into high society. During World War I our narrator stumbles into a pub which is a gay cruising spot that also caters to S&M and spies on some important characters in the narrative I've completely skipped over, mostly to do with the Nature of Art (in society) subplot, because nothing actually happens in them and it's all social parties and talking. Also features priests gay cruising because of course.

The book ends at another long party after the war where the narrator realizes the big concepts that He's Old and Things Have Changed and Isn't That Dandy. And he finally starts writing the book you are reading now.

* * *

That's it. That's the book. The prose is amazing, and occasionally there are beautiful Philosophical Sentences That Say Something, but it's surrounded by all *this*. I can recommend the first volume-and-a-half because at least then the narrator is young and his mistakes are excusable, but he just doesn't learn. Everyone in the book is a terrible person. There are no positive relationships. At least in *War and Peace* the aristocrats were worried about the war; the closest we get to that here is "how antisemitic am I feeling today" depending on how the Dreyfus Affair is progressing. And *Anna Karenina* has a *Wuthering Heights-*feel with someone ending up on a farm. Here we're stuck in the mind of a paranoid jealous lover who falls in love with anything that moves, tossed about on the storms of emotion that by the end we are all seasick to.

Does the book even say anything? Nothing that, by the time you have developed the attention span to read the book, you shouldn't already know. Things change. People change. Memories change. Love and society warp reality to fit narratives. It is impossible to fully know another human being. We are all alone.

And economic coercion in romantic relationships is bad. I don't think this is supported by the text, but I think you should take that away anyways.

[^y13si9de2]: Nowadays, one can find other rankings online, with In Search of Lost Time generally being relegated to lower as more obscure works come to light, but generally still sits comfortably in the top ten. Worm turns out to be slightly longer, but is not traditionally published. 

[^0jw6ov1h6jv8]: Summed across the length of the book, with many turning out to be plot-critical, though, as we shall see, my own recollections of the book may not be exact mimeographs of the book itself. But this review is not precisely a review; it is not about the book itself but about my experiences with the book, and experience can only be shared through the lens of memory. For there is nothing that one can say about the book itself. It is a book. There are pages with words. It has been written. A review of the book is through the reviewer, through their experiences, through their memory. 

[^muphz8for6]: I have returned to the book to find that this section is in fact only three pages long. The memory and the act of sharing the memory has lengthened it as the size of a fish caught by the banks of the rivers of last week grows upon each retelling. And yet it is not the actual length of the fish which matters, but the size that it takes up within our minds, displacing all other thoughts until they spill over, uncaught, as Archimedes first beheld. 

[^07fg56matved]: Despite being conversationally fluent in Chinese, I am atrocious at reading it, though I could generally understand once I got the pronunciation. This did not help on figuring out 愛因斯坦 is Einstein's name, because I was expecting names to be two or three characters, and character pronunciation lookups are slow on the Kindle. 

[^aq4n9dixo1g]: But, as the reference is in the narration rather than the dialogue, this may just be the narrator describing the events of the past with similes from the future. Anachronistic, yes, but all is recollection, all is memory. 

[^mr3njhdsts]: One major theme of the work is jealousy. A favorite quote of mine from the Swann Song Story, which is probably one of the core themes of the book:His jealousy, like an octopus which throws out a first, then a second, and finally a third tentacle, fastened itself irremovably first to that moment, five o’clock in the afternoon, then to another, then to another again. 

[^nhq7mok1xqi]: On a more careful reading, this is not quite clear. Earlier in the chapter there is extended section about "the houses of assignation which I began to frequent some years later" but the author's refusal to place dates makes the tracking of time difficult. The falling out with Gilberte likely takes place at most a year and a half later, which is likely not "some years later", but in the aftermath the narrator would "pour out my sorrows upon the bosoms of women whom I did not love." and spend all ten thousand francs. 

[^fckv5d6jos5]: The author was a closeted homosexual, which means that these themes probably have a deeper meaning. Unfortunately, I read the book without this knowledge, and could not extract much out of these themes other than "this is how society is". 

[^epffa299hq]: Whatever that means. The book is notoriously vague on a lot of things, but at the very least they're naked in bed. Individually. I don't think together is supported by the text. 

[^6tg1tmceimo]: At this point I was so checked out and the telegram was glossed over so quickly in the text that I missed this point by five pages and had to flip back to check that, yes, Albertine actually died and no, the narrator isn't imagining the grief that he would be feeling if he received a telegram of Albertine's death because both before and after the telegram are filled with the contortions of the narrator's mind that it's hard to tell the counterfactuals from the factuals. I think it makes more sense if the narrator was imagining how he would feel if Albertine died as opposed to the freak horse accident exposing a national lesbian conspiracy.