Finished: In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (Proust). I read the second book in Proust's seven volume masterpiece, In Search of Lost Time, slowly over the last two weeks, and while I admit the writing is stunning at times...the in depth description of every minute detail and feeling are not quite my cup of tea, and I stand by what I wrote about the first book, Swann's Way, which I read three years ago. It was this:

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.

So...in this second book, the narrator, who is never named, which drives me a bit crazy, has moved into adolescence. His age is never given, but I'm assuming he's between 13 to 15 years old. He is still just as self-absorbed, but I think I have come to understand this as just the author putting every single thought of the boy's on the page. I suppose if all our thoughts were spilled out on the page, we might sound a bit self-absorbed as well. The narrator is still very dramatic, with the smallest things blowing up in his mind to be great joys or tragedies. He spends the first half of the book actually meeting and spending time with the first love of his life, the little girl from the first book, Gilberte. Gilberte is the daughter of two other characters from the first book...the rich and socially regarded Charles Swann, who unfortunately married down when he married his mistress Odette, who had already given birth to their daughter when they married. So, Gilberte and the narrator are roughly the same age, and one day when meeting at the park, while he's trying to grab a letter from her and he's rather tackling her to get it, he has an orgasm against her! After this, he is truly in love, and lucky for him, Charles and Odette adore him so he is invited over to their house all the time. Especially since most of the ladies in the upper social echelons ignore Ms. Swann, they feel like the narrator, being from what seems to be a pretty well off family himself, will be a good influence on Gilberte. Everything goes fine throughout the year until one day it becomes clear that Gilberte becomes bored of having the narrator over and says to him "well, I did love you once". Sigh. So, the narrator goes home, promising himself that he will ignore Gilberte, but for some reason expecting her to send him a letter of apology or come crawling over to him, which, of course, she never does. We are treated to the highs and lows of his every thought as he goes through his first adolescent heartbreak. The second half of the book occurs two years later when the narrator goes with his grandmother to the seaside town of Balbec for the summer. Though he has a near panic attack about leaving his mother, which makes me think of him as much younger...it would seem that he's maybe 16 or 17 during this time. It takes him awhile to get used to his surroundings, and we read every tangent of every metaphor you can imagine as he describes his feelings. Proust is such a good writer, though, don't get me wrong. I will even include a couple of favorite passages...it's just that if the actual action in this 533 page book could be pulled out and made into a book, it would probably be about 83 pages long. I kid not. So...while in Balbec, the narrator becomes great friends with the nephew of one of his grandmother's good friends, Robert de Saint-Loup. However, as much as Robert enjoys the narrator's company as well, the narrator feels as if he's got to be always at his best intellectually when conversing with Robert, while he'd much rather spend time with the gaggle of young girls he has espied walking every day on the boardwalk by the sea. He falls in love with each of them individually and as a whole group...but mostly he falls in love with  Albertine. She is not up to his social standing, but he doesn't care, as they spend the last several weeks of the summer together. When he tries to kiss her, though, she is shocked and rebuffs him, but remains his friend. He ends the summer packed up to leave the near deserted summer town, reflecting on the swelling, in and out movements of the ocean that have fascinated him all summer. I have a feeling that being only the second book, this will not be the end of Albertine...or of friend, Robert de Saint-Loup...or even of one of the other girls, Andree. We shall see! I actually will probably read the third book, since I already bought it at a used bookstore. :-) I think I'll give it some time before I do though. ok, so here are a couple of examples of Proust's writing that I did enjoy.

This was after the narrator quit visiting Gilberte and was trying to make himself get over her. It really is beautiful writing.

Memories of love are, in fact, no exception to the general laws of remembering, which are themselves subject to the more general laws of habit. Habit weakens all things; but the things that are best at reminding us of a person are those which, because they were insignificant, we have forgotten, and which have therefore lost none of their power. Which is why the greater part of our memory exists outside us, in a dampish breeze, in the musty air of a bedroom or the smell of autumn's first fires, things through which we can retrieve any part of us that the reasoning mind, having no use for it, disdained, the last vestige of the past, the best of it, the part which, after all our tears seem to have dried, can make us weep again. 

And this one...when the narrator begins to see his mother as a separate being maybe? I loved this one too. sigh.

I was beginning to realize for the first time that it was possible for my mother to live without me, to live for reasons unrelated to me, to lead a life of her own. She was going to live for herself, with my father, who she may have thought deserved a simpler and more enjoyable life than my ill health and nervous disposition allowed him. This separation from her saddened me even more, as I told myself that she very likely saw it as a welcome pause in the succession of disappointments I had brought upon her, which she had never spoken of, but which must have made her see the prospect of spending the holidays with me as irksome; very likely she even saw it as a first experimental step toward the future life to which she would have to resign herself, as she and my father advanced in years, in which I would see less of her, in which--and this I had never glimpsed in my worst nightmares--she would become something of a stranger to me, a lady to be seen going home alone to a house where I did not live, and where she would ask the concierge whether there was not a letter from me.