The Guermantes Way Part 1
Written by Marcel Proust
Narrated by Neville Jason
4.5/5
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About this audiobook
Marcel Proust
Marcel Proust was born in Paris in 1871. His family belonged to the wealthy upper middle class, and Proust began frequenting aristocratic salons at a young age. Leading the life of a society dilettante, he met numerous artists and writers. He wrote articles, poems, and short stories (collected as Les Plaisirs et les Jours), as well as pastiches and essays (collected as Pastiches et Mélanges) and translated John Ruskin’s Bible of Amiens. He then went on to write novels. He died in 1922.
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Reviews for The Guermantes Way Part 1
15 ratings6 reviews
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5"We are attracted by any life which represents for us something unknown and strange, by a last illusion still unshattered."On the last day of the year, I finished The Guermantes Way, the third volume of Marcel Proust's magnum opus, In Search of Lost Time. At the beginning of the book, nothing much has changed. Our protagonist is a bit older but still the sensitive and self-obsessed youth that we came to know in Swann's Way and In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower. He has eschewed the intellectual life, and is attempting to ingratiate himself with the aristocratic Guermantes family. The text is peppered with sharp insights attributed to the narrator but seemingly outside his scope of emotional or intellectual insight. Or perhaps the narrator has far keener powers of perception when it comes to others than he does with himself. Some favorites:"The alleged 'sensitivity' of neurotic people is matched by their egotism; they cannot abide the flaunting by others of the sufferings to which they pay an ever-increasing attention in themselves."His impressions of the social pecking order at the theatre:"For the folding seats on its shore and the forms of the monsters in the stalls were mirrored in those eyes in simple obedience to the laws of optics and according to their angle of incidence, as happens with those two sections of external reality to which, knowing that they do not possess any soul, however rudimentary, that can be considered analogous to our own, we should think ourselves insane to address a smile or a glance: namely, minerals and people to whom we have not been introduced."And a foreshadowing of what he is to learn of the aristocracy whose company he craves:"I realised that it is not only the physical world that differs from the aspect in which we see it; that all reality is perhaps equally dissimilar from what we believe ourselves to be directly perceiving and which we compose with the aid of ideas that do not reveal themselves but are none the less efficacious."The beginning of the book is a trifle frustrating as the reader is delivered much more of the same from the first two volumes. But then, the curtain, both figurative and literal in some cases, is lifted and we see where Proust is to take us next. The aristocracy is exposed as an illusion, that something strange and unknown that may be craved until its true nature is revealed. The social elite have become in many instances financially destitute as well as morally suspect and intellectually pedestrian. The story of the day, the Dreyfus affair, becomes an instrument with which they may exclude their Jewish friends from their inner circle.As Marcel becomes more and more disillusioned with the life he has chosen for himself, the hand of the writer shows through the text revealing a Proustian belief that great art is created in isolation. Social climbing amidst a vacant and decaying aristocratic set can yield nothing but a time drain whose reversal could yield a creative product of great worth.There is much to love here. The nearly 100 page long description of one afternoon in the salon of Mme. de Villeparisis is masterful, written as if in real time with all the subtle machinations one expects from Proust. The language as always is entrancing, languorous and lovely. And just at the end, just as one begins to wonder if more of this same loveliness will be required, all of this disillusionment and social strife comes to a head in the story of M. Swann again, and one yearns to see the new direction in which this story might turn. So I will read on. Perhaps the last three volumes in 2010.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I'm gradually working my way through Proust's 7 volume series, In Search of Lost Time. This book, The Guermantes Way, is volume 3 of 7.In part one of this volume, our hero and his family move into the Guermantes Hotel. He becomes enchanted with the Duchess de Guermantes and begins to dream about what her life is like. He starts to plan his day so that he 'accidentally' bumps into her. She realizes what he is doing and despises him. He pays a lengthy visit to Saint-Loup and gets to know SL's friends, and his mistress. He makes his first ever telephone call. In part two, his beloved grandmother falls ill and dies. Albertine re-enters his life, and he tries to embark on a romance with a mystery woman. He has an interesting encounter with de Charlus again. By the end of the book, he finds himself finally accepted into the high society of the Guermantes family - and it is much more ordinary than he expected it would be.Proust continues to delve into human minds and behavior. There's a lot of hypocrisy in these books...people who act one way when they are really feeling differently. The narrator exposes them wonderfully.As usual, Proust's prose is beautiful. And relaxing. I find myself being lulled to dreamland by his words. I keep mentioning what an EASY read these books are! If you are intrigued by Proust but have been too intimidated to start - just TRY the first one, Swann's Way. You might be surprised.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The third part of the Search for Lost time, and also the longest, I didn't enjoy this as much as the first two. It perhaps lacks some of the excitement that the first two have in their storyline, and when this is combined with certain scenes that seem to go on for ever, it is just a bit harder to get into. What can still be appreciated though is the humour, and the same quality of writing as the first two, but I think many readers will find some sections of this book boring. However, in a work four thousand pages long, it would be surprising if a uniform and outstanding quality were to be maintained throughout, I am just hoping that the remaining volumes return to brilliance.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5In this volume Proust shifts topics and mounts an analysis of our pursuit of status. His narrator climbs through the higher levels of the social hierarchy and finds himself in conflict between the natural pull of the aristocracy and its self-absorbed, vain, pedestrian core. Powerful and brilliant, as the previous two volumes, though perhaps slightly less engaging at the start.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A lot about the Dreyfus affair- Judaism. A lot about obsession and then the let down once one finds out the person is not as you imagined. His grandmother died. That was painful- she also became different than she had always appeared to be. I can't wait for more!
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5My least favourite volume so far, which is not to distract from how good some of it is. The writing at its finest moments is breathtaking (it would give things away to mention what they are), but I did lose some interest during the most drawn out dinner parties. The book is very cynical about the society it studies, but is doubtless justified in being so. I assume that the journey from worship to scorn of high society mirrors Proust's own - and he makes a thoroughly convincing case.