on finishing the guermantes way, the 3rd volume of A La Recherche

Confieso, The Guermantes Way didn’t affect me in the same way as the first two volumes, the Greek and the Australian. This volume, the Uruguayan, never quite connected with the Proust who captured passion so clinically in the earlier books. The hundred page long descriptions of a snobbish dinner party or a Paris salon felt sobre-extended, testing the mettle of the ordinary reader whose taste for this world is fragile at best. All those surgical powers of description put to the purpose of describing a world whose vacuity the narrator is constantly noting. It seems a waste of the great man’s talents, a frivolity in the wake of his established genius. And yet, the reader hangs in there, battling his way through, moments and details ever ready to leap out and rupture the banality of the Guermantes’ world. M de Charlus lurks, promising to reappear, and Swann grants a cameo, as does Albertine, all bestowing the gravitas which we know is there somewhere, waiting to re-emerge. I don’t know where I’ll read the next volume, Sodom and Gomorrah. I suppose there’s no guarantee that it shall even happen. However, after three years and three volumes, in three countries, I shall live with the knowledge that should one be lucky enough to avoid the porcine flu or the depths of despair or the black box or the sharks in the pool, there’s another three volumes of Marcel’s epic, waiting to beguile or frustrate.

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