[.ca] The Captive: Part 1 (ISBN 9626341904)

From Amazon.com:
Marcel Proust whiled away the first half of his life as a self-conscious aesthete and social climber. The second half he spent in the creation of the mighty roman-fleuve that is Remembrance of Things Past, memorializing his own dandyism and parvenu hijinks even as he revealed their essential hollowness. Proust begins, of course, at the beginning--with the earliest childhood perceptions and sorrows. Then, over several thousand pages, he retraces the course of his own adolescence and adulthood, democratically dividing his experiences among the narrator and a sprawling cast of characters. Who else has ever decanted life into such ornate, knowing, wrought-iron sentences? Who has subjected love to such merciless microscopy, discriminating between the tiniest variations of desire and self-delusion? Who else has produced a grief-stricken record of time's erosion that can also make you laugh for entire pages? The answer to all these questions is: nobody.

Truth and Reality:
I first picked up the first volume way back in 1987, and now (2001, Oct), I finally finished the entire works. In the last book ("Time Regained") Proust lucidly laid out his philosophy of Truth and Reality. In doing so, he contrasted the traditional Plato's sense of objective-reality as "things in themselves", Truth as a notion independent of any human observation, to what will be the precursor of Modern Analytic Philosophy (of latter Wittgenstein's and American Pragmatism) in which reality and truth are defined as "things that are experienced". For Proust, reality and truth are embedded in the way we remember the past. What makes the church in Combray real, is my rememberance of it, and all of my sensation, emotion, and feeling that comes with that memory. This is an extremely radical view of reality and truth for his time, since it amounts to say that truth and reality are subjective, not objective. Proust, however, wanted to go further that this. He made the connection between reality/truth and arts. For him, arts is a unique way of remembering and experiencing the past. Only by remembering and conjuring all of your past memory of the past, can arts be borned.

Simplistic yet evocative full-color art:
Remembrance Of Things Past Part Two: Within A Budding Grove is the second novel of an English-language, graphic novel adaptation and illustrated by Stephane Heuet of Marcel Proust's classic work of European literature. The simplistic yet evocative full-color art and the delicate lettering bring the formal style of the nineteenth-century era to life in this enchanting and attention engaging presentation. Highly Recommended!

Read all the reviews here-they're all right on!!:
I read this entire opus in the summer of 1975, while lounging around the local pool and tennis courts, as a young seeker of wisdom and truth. I had read Mann (MAGIC MOUNTAIN),Musil (MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES), WAS AMAZED, GAVE THIS ONE A SHOT. A lot is very slow going,but it's true this is a book that really makes you appreciate beauty, and frankly be glad that you (I) have eyes and ears. Most people, it seems, go thru life without really bothering to appreciate the everyday beauties that are all around us,corny as that seems. Walk around your neighborhood some evening.How many people will be strolling outside enchanted at the the stars/heavens? For every one,there are probably a thousand watching an obnoxious sit-com with canned laughter. You see, a great artist like Proust makes us look at the world in this way. Walk into even a do-it-yourself clothing shop,and notice all the patterns. Most of us barely pay attention. Proust' ways of seeing,and describing are like any great painter. He often invokes Vermeer, a fair comparison.He is awed by cathedrals,landscapes,you name it. And his discussions of the Great War, including some admiration for German soldiers, are a surprise. Yes, it goes on and on,and I could not make the effort now,except to browse thru it. BTW, I prefer Mann and Musil, who seem to have a better story line,and stringer narrative. Marcel's mother complex,and all the super-long interrelationships and descriptions may put you off, for good reason,but even just browsing thru this shows you this fellow had phenomenal powers of observation,even forgetting all the rest of the greatness of this wondrous, if boring at times, work of art.

Providing a new and absorbing perspective:
Remembrance Of Things Past, Volume One: Within A Budding Grove is the first in what will be a 12-14 volume English-language graphic novel adaptation of the introspective French literary work by Marcel Proust. The simple, full-color artwork of Stephane Heuet paints the characters in a style reminiscent of Tintin, bringing to life the world and thoughts housed in Proust's immortal pages. Remembrance Of Things Past: With A Budding Grove is very highly recommended as providing a new and absorbing perspective on a worthy literary classic.

Number 53--pourquois pas?:
Yes, one more review of this monster, only because I have some different views on a few of its features. But first, to reinforce what others have written, it's a tremendously satisfying read. I read it twenty years ago and am now almost finished for the second time. I picked it up again because I was so tired of flailing around looking for something worthwhile to read--with all the jillions of books out there, the number of truly rewarding ones is remarkably small. But it's amazing how different the experience is the second time around. The first time, I was so completely enchanted by the style alone, and gave my concentration to it so completely, that I missed a lot of the "story" (if it could be said to have one). Now I'm beginning to think that that is part of Proust's enormous joke on the reader. Here is a narrator who succeeds wonderfully in rendering every character in his story--every character, that is, except himself. Even his girlfriends--given what we now know about Proust's having modelled them after men he was obsessed with--come across as quite believable females, even if they are a bit hazy around the edges compared with, say, the vibrant and robust portrait of Robert de Saint-Loup that fairly leaps from the page. And in Mme Verdurin and Baron de Charlus he creates two of the great characters--the great people--of all literature. But he fails to create a believable person in his narrator! For despite the narrator's claims that his company is ardently and constantly sought by everyone from soldiers in their barracks to dukes and duchesses in their drawing rooms, he never--NEVER, in the course of thousands of pages--gives us one instance of his wit or charm when interacting with others. In fact, he impresses one as a rather repulsive little creep, neurotic and neurasthenic in the extreme, and rather cruel. This is not to say that he fails to be witty and charming as a narrator--far from it. First of all, there are the marvelous characters mentioned above. And if the reader can somehow weather the tedious, meticulous, seemingly endless analyses of his "love" for Gilberte and, even more remorselessly, for Albertine, one encounters passages of great lyric beauty, sentences that are entrancingly serpentine, metaphors stunningly original and transitions masterfully seamless.