In Search of Lost Time Read Online Free PDF Page A

Odette and the
     narrator’s youthful infatuation with Swann’s daughter Gilberte.
     And we will have our own unexpected memories that enable us to identify with the
     narrator in the most famous scene of all, in which the taste of a tea-soaked
     madeleine suddenly triggers his full recollection of his childhood in the village of
     Combray and, from this, leads to the unfolding of all the subsequent action in the
     3,000-page novel.
    We will find, too, that the better acquainted we become with this book
     the more it yields. Given its richness and resilience, Proust’s work may
     be enjoyed on every level and in every form – as quotation, as excerpt, as
     compendium, even as movie and comic book – but in the end it is best
     appreciated in the way it was meant to be experienced, in the full, slow reading and
     rereading of every word, in utter submission to Proust’s subtle
     psychological analyses, his precise portraits, his compassionate humour, his richly
     coloured and lyrical landscapes,his extended digressions, his
     architectonic sentences, his symphonic structures, his perfect formal designs.
    The Way by Swann’s
opens with the early bedtime
     of the narrator as a grown man: he describes how he used to spend the sleepless
     portions of his nights remembering events from his early life and finally evokes the
     episode of the madeleine. A much longer section follows, containing the memories of
     his childhood at Combray that were summoned by the taste of the madeleine and that
     came flooding back to him in unprecedentedly minute and sensuous detail. This first
     part of the book, ‘Combray’, having opened at bedtime, closes
     – itself like a long sleepless night – at dawn.
    The second part of the book, ‘A Love of
     Swann’s’, which jumps back many years, consists of the
     self-contained story of Swann’s miserable, jealousy-racked love for the
     shallow and fickle Odette who will one day be his wife; the narrator with whom we
     began the book scarcely appears at all. The third and last part,
     ‘Place-names: the Name’, much shorter than the rest of the
     volume, includes the story of the narrator’s infatuation, as a boy, with
     Swann’s daughter Gilberte over weeks of playing together on the chilly
     lawns of the Champs Elysées and ends with a sort of coda: on a late
     November day in the Bois de Boulogne, the narrator muses on the contrast between the
     beauties of the days of his childhood and the banality of his present, and on the
     nature of time.
    The story is told in the first person. Proust scholars have identified
     a handful of slightly different Is in
In Search of Lost Time
, but the two
     main Is are those of the narrator as he tells the story and the narrator as a child
     and young man. The first person, though, is freely abandoned from time to time in
     favour of what seems to be an omniscient narrator, as when, in
     ‘Combray’, we witness conversations between his Aunt
     Léonie and the servant Françoise which the boy could not have
     heard; and most remarkably during nearly the whole of ‘A Love of
     Swann’s’.
    The story is told in the first person, the protagonist is referred to
     as ‘Marcel’, and the book is filled with events and characters
     closelyresembling those of Proust’s own life, yet this
     novel is not autobiography wearing a thin disguise of fiction but, rather, the
     opposite – fiction in the guise of autobiography. For although
     Proust’s own life experience is the material out of which he forms his
     novel, as is the case for any writer of fiction, it has been altered, recombined,
     shaped to create a coherent and meaningful fictional artefact, and this very crucial
     alchemy – art’s transformation of life – is itself one
     of Proust’s preoccupations and a principal subject and theme of the book.
     The episode of the madeleine,