J.L. Sutton's Reviews > The Fugitive

“The only true voyage of discovery . . . would be not to visit strange lands, but to possess other eyes, to behold the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to behold the hundred universes that each of them beholds.”



In The Fugitive, the sixth installment of Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time, the narrator's obsession with Albertine, his desire to own and control Albertine, takes on a different form with her sudden death. She is no longer the captive, but a fugitive who he can never truly possess. Of course, grief for Proust presents an opportunity to meditate and obsess over the past.

Proust also recognizes that time is moving forward as characters we've seen throughout this epic are getting older and, while war breaks out across Europe, time is perhaps running out for him to make his own literary mark. I've compared Proust's writing to paintings; that continues here, but I might also call them slow-moving rivers. Sometimes not much seems to happen, but everything has incredible depth.



On to the last book!

“The creation of the world did not occur at the beginning of time, it occurs every day.”