Although I enjoy Balzac and Flaubert I must admit I have always avoided Proust.  Along with Trollope, this summer I made the commitment to start Remembrance of Things Past.  My initial inclination was to answer wryly when asked what I was reading that I was definitely on my way to losing time but within a few hours I knew how absolutely wrong I was.  Now 2 novels in- Swann’s Way and Within a Budding Grove completed and starting Gueramantes Way, I would not be doing the works justice by limiting them to the narrow confines of a man’s memories  from his childhood to adulthood and the sometimes inane prejudices of period french society.  The remembrances are richly told, characters are developed and frailties and prejudices exposed.

In the first two installments the narrator experiences his first  two loves (Gilberte-Swann’s daughter and Albertine), watches Swann  “a bon vivant” love /loathe/marry and travels from Combray to Balbec.  As much as I love the narrator the secondary characters such as Aunt Leonie and her competition with her maid, Uncle Adolphe and his “actresses”, Bergotte and Saint-Loup and their opinions of the french aristocracy are vivid and compelling.  So far on this Proustian journey the one thing that keeps me turning the pages is simply the gorgeous dialogue and for that I have to especially thank C.K. Moncrieff for not losing any of Proust’s Proustness.