Finished: Swann's Way (Proust). The first book in Proust's acclaimed "masterpiece", In Search of Lost Time. Hmm, not my favorite book. I kind of felt myself wondering if I'd ever get the lost time back it was taking me to read this book. It's not that I found the writing bad. Proust has an amazing ability to describe something in such detail that you can honestly see it, feel it, smell it. It's just that he describes every single little thing in such detail that each detail develops its own explanatory detail, and then that detail gets another tangent, and so on. When it takes six pages to describe one pane of glass in a church window, you know you're in for a very long read.

I also found the narrator to be so self-absorbed and bordering on obsessive in his longings for his mother to come and say goodnight to him, and then, on his desire to see the little girl he'd "fallen in love with" as a child when they played. It seemed to be so narcissistic, but then on the other hand, those parts of the book were complete details of his innermost thoughts. So, perhaps he wasn't being any more self-absorbed than the rest of us are. He just happened to write it all down.

The middle part of the book, about the other main character's love affair with Odette was a bit more interesting to read, until it too became more about Swann's obsession with Odette and about him expressing his innermost turmoils and thoughts in such minute detail.

I don't know....I had high hopes for reading the entire seven book series since it had been so touted. I think now that I'll just stop with the one book and consider Proust done. I reserve the right to change my mind about that, though, because there were definitely times his writing evoked in me great empathy and emotion, so I have mixed feelings. Here are a few snippets of his writing. :-)

Describing what it was like to get used to being in a hotel room instead of his own bed:

"Habit! That skillful but very slow housekeeper who begins by letting our mind suffer for weeks in a temporary arrangement; but whom we are nevertheless truly happy to discover, for without habit our mind, reduced to no more than its own resources, would be powerless to make a lodging habitable."

Describing his grandmother:

"...and my grandmother would go off again, sad, discouraged, yet smiling, for she was so humble at heart and so gentle that her tenderness for others, and the lack of fuss she made over her own person and her sufferings, came together in her gaze in a smile in which, unlike what ones sees in the faces of so many people, there was irony only for herself, and for all of us a sort of kiss from her eyes, which could not see those she cherished without caressing them passionately with her gaze."

Describing his sadness at his mother not coming up to say goodnight to him because they had company for dinner:

"The region of sadness I had just entered was as distinct from the region into which I had hurled myself with such joy only a moment before, as in certain skies a band of pink is separated as though by a line from a band of green or black. One sees a bird fly into the pink, it is about to reach the end of it, it is nearly touching the black, then it has to entered it. The desires that had surrounded me a short time ago, to go to Guermantes, to travel, to be happy, were so far behind me now that their fulfillment would not have brought me any pleasure. How I would have given all that up in order to be able to cry all night in Mama's arms! I was trembling, I did not take my anguished eyes off my  mother's face, which would not be appearing that evening in the room where I could already see myself in my thoughts, I wanted to die. And that state of mind would continue until the following day, when the morning rays, like the gardener, would lean their bars against the wall clothed in nasturtiums that climbed up to my window, and I would jump out of bed to hurry down into the garden, without remembering, now, that evening would ever bring back with it the hour for leaving my mother."