Vit Babenco's Reviews > Swann's Way

Marcel Proust is a weaver – he weaves his narration from memories of the past, dreams and threads of irony…

A sleeping man holds in a circle around him the sequence of the hours, the order of the years and worlds. He consults them instinctively as he wakes and reads in a second the point on the earth he occupies, the time that has elapsed before his waking; but their ranks can be mixed up, broken.

Memories of childhood: relatives, relationships in the family, hearsay and gossips, life of neighbours, churchgoing, perambulations in the country, books and their correlation with reality…

A real human being, however profoundly we sympathize with him, is in large part perceived by our senses, that is to say, remains opaque to us, presents a dead weight which our sensibility cannot lift. If a calamity should strike him, it is only in a small part of the total notion we have of him that we will be able to be moved by this; even more, it is only in a part of the total notion he has of himself that he will be able to be moved himself. The novelist’s happy discovery was to have the idea of replacing these parts, impenetrable to the soul, by an equal quantity of immaterial parts, that is to say, parts which our soul can assimilate.

Kith and kin… And visitors… One of the frequent visitors was Swann – a connoisseur of art, a socialite mixing in high society, a man about town…

Swann did not try to convince himself that the women with whom he spent his time were pretty, but to spend his time with women he already knew were pretty. And these were often women of a rather vulgar beauty, for the physical qualities that he looked for without realizing it were the direct opposite of those he admired in the women sculpted or painted by his favorite masters. Depth of expression, melancholy, would freeze his senses, which were, however, immediately aroused by flesh that was healthy, plump, and pink.

Odette, a woman of demimonde, had eyes for Swann and was attempting to win him over… But she only attracted him because of her resemblance to Zipporah on the painting by Botticelli… However their relationships kept evolving and finally Swann fell in love… But very soon Odette turned the tables and became cold while Swann remained hopelessly infatuated…

And in fact, Swann’s love had reached the stage where the doctor and, in certain affections, even the boldest surgeon, ask themselves if ridding a patient of his vice or relieving him of his disease is still reasonable or even possible.

When one falls in love with one’s ideal and then finds out that the object of one’s passion is quite different from this ideal one is doomed to suffer beyond reason…