The Way by Swann’s - 5

One of the first things to notice is that Marcel is very comfortable with servants and the whole notion of a servant class to do his work for him. There’s nothing objectively wrong with this but it does indicate a certain level of leisure. He has the time and energy to concoct gargantuan sentences.

I noticed this the first time through the first section. Now I’m slowing down on the rereading and seeing how it colors everything. (Yes, I’ve gone back to page one, to attempt to let Proust’s method sink deeper into my psyche before I go on. It’s amazing what I’m seeing the second time through. For one thing, I am much more comfortable with the long sentences, laden as they are with confusing asides and digressions. It takes some getting used to feel comfortable with them, but the key, I think, is not to attempt to understand everything. For me, at least, this would be flatly impossible.)

The book itself, I mean the physical object, feels very comfortable. It is a solid paperback, not too heavy, perfect for extended reading sessions. I haven’t mentioned that this edition comes freighted with a lot of baggage: a general editor’s introduction, a translator’s introduction, (these two run to almost 30 pages total), a list of footnotes near the end, and a curiously laconic synopsis at the very end, which, in a soaringly anti-Proustian manner, boils down whole pages of his prose into one or two words. Surely this burden of addenda and addstarta has to be one reason classics are so often looked at then set aside. All that material makes it seem like work, when, in reality, this book is not work at all. Especially if I just surrender to the strangeness of it. Which I have done.

The paper is very thin. This first volume is five hundred pages long, but when I’m holding it it feels much shorter, perhaps only 250 or 300 pages. The spine bears a small photograph of Marcel. Not the same as the one at the top of this blog, but he does have his hand under his chin, as though propping up his head. And the sleeve, with its three buttons, looks like the same sleeve. Maybe these are two photos from the same session with the photographer? Maybe Marcel propped up his head with his hands to steady himself during long exposures?