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发表于 2023-10-24 22:43:34
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It's interesting to me that some people said Swann In Love didn't grab them (or not at first) because for me it was where the book really pulled me in. I love the various characters at the salon (especially Cottard) and the way they're introduced. And, again, they're all given comparable screen time so we don't really know which ones will turn out to be important later. (Even the little phrase is actually introduced before Swann "first" hears at at the Verdurin's, when Proust describes how he had heard it at a party the year before.)
Overall the characterization of the Verdurins themselves makes them seem like their era's equivalent of hipsters. They want to know about or do everything "before it's cool" and anything that is done by anyone else thereby becomes boring to them. They're like people on who listen to bands that you probably haven't heard of. I get a kick out of it.
A few bits that struck me:
We come to its [love's] aid; we falsify it by memory and by suggestion; recognising one of its symptoms we recall and recreate the rest. Since we possess its hymn, engraved on our hearts in its entirety, there is no need of any woman to repeat the opening lines, potent with the admiration which her beauty inspires, for us to remember all that follows. And if she begin in the middle, where it sings of our existing, henceforward, for one another only, we are well enough attuned to that music to be able to take it up and follow our partner, without hesitation, at the first pause in her voice.
I like this musical analogy, especially because it seems to parallel the "little phrase" and the effect it comes to have on Swann (at the end of Swann In Love).
And Swann it was who, before she allowed her face, as though despite her efforts, to fall upon his lips, held it back for a moment longer, at a little distance between his hands. He had intended to leave time for her mind to overtake her body’s movements, to recognise the dream which she had so long cherished and to assist at its realisation, like a mother invited as a spectator when a prize is given to the child whom she has reared and loves. Perhaps, moreover, Swann himself was fixing upon these features of an Odette not yet possessed, not even kissed by him, on whom he was looking now for the last time, that comprehensive gaze with which, on the day of his departure, a traveller strives to bear away with him in memory the view of a country to which he may never return.
This part reminds me of a similar part of The Great Gatsby, when Gatsby first falls kisses Daisy:
His heart beat faster and faster as Daisy's white face came up to his own. He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God. So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning-fork that had been struck upon a star. Then he kissed her.
There's that same idea of wanting to preserve the last bit of independence or distance, the last moment before a person becomes "the person you love". |
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发表于 2023-10-24 22:41:32