In Search of Lost Time Volume IV Sodom and Gomorrah (Modern Library Classics)

… or is he simply a restorative balm rubbed over the synapses which stimulates a recall of the days of yore, before TV, before the “digital age,” when one would take a postprandial stroll to the Pré Catalan, greet the neighbors along the way, and think, if not talk, in sentences featuring ten to twenty subordinate clauses? Nary a smartphone in sight; people paid visits; people were “in” on certain days to entertain. After a two year hiatus, I found myself able to once again enter, and be enthralled in the Proustian world that is now more than half complete. Homosexuality. A new theme, which is strongly woven throughout this volume. The volume’s title suggests it, and leaving nothing to chance, Proust commences the volume with a quote from Alfred de Vigny: “The women shall have Gomorrah, and the men shall have Sodom.” And then he jumps right in with a straightforward and frank depiction of the Baron, M. de Charlus, having a relationship with the ex-tailor, Jupien. M. de Charlus is greying, middle aged, rotund, and has some francs in his pocket, which facilitates the next youthful conquest of someone from the working classes. Is Jupien a courtesan, and is he “spurned” when the next conquest occurs? Much later on in this volume, M. de Charlus is taking his latest “conquest,” Morel, a violinist in the Army, to the “salons,” but deludes himself into thinking virtually no one suspects his proclivities. Proust, as is his style, spends pages describing how most others know. And then there is the Gomorrah aspect. The narrator continues his “I need you, I don’t need you” relationship with Albertine. Dr. Cottard and the narrator watch Albertine and a woman friend, Andrees, dancing chest to chest. Cottard suggests that perhaps Albertine is having a lesbian affair. Throughout the rest of the volume, it is an idea that the narrator cannot get out of his head. What if your rival is not another man, but a woman, and furthermore, she satisfies your girlfriend more than you can? Enough to stir some deep-rooted insecurities. Of the many terms by which homosexuals are identified by, Proust uses a term I had never heard before: “inverted.” This volume is placed in the heart of the pre-World War I “Belle Epoque.” As with other volumes, there are the intense, and naturally lengthy descriptions of the salons of high society life. Who is invited. Who is snubbed. Alfred Dreyfus has a dominating presence in these salons. Swann, for one, believes in his innocence, but probably would not take the “risk” of signing a petition in his defense. Or, as Proust puts it: “…whatever opinion one might hold in one’s heart of hearts as to his guilt, constituted a sort of thank-offering for the manner in which one had been received in the Faubourg Saint-Germaine.” That “thank you” meant overlooking the sentencing of an innocent man in order to support the “glory” of the Army. Plus ca change… There is a 100-page section on just one gathering of the “select clan” of insiders at La Raspeliere, which is the salon of the Verdurins, high on the cliffs overlooking the sea in Normandy. Proust dazzles with descriptions such as: “…while the sea, gently rising, with the unfurling of each wave completely buried in layers of crystal the melody whose phrases appeared to be separated from one another like those angels lutanists which on the roof of an Italian cathedral rise between the pinnacles of blue porphyry and foaming jasper.” Proust devotes pages to the etymologies of place names in Normandy. In another section, Proust devotes pages to a hotel employee given to the repeated use of malapropisms – the translation of which into English was an impressive feat by the translator. Pages? Yes. There is an equally long section on the ramification(s) of giving the elevator boy a tip, and the amount. Proust even states that an entire novel could be written about Morel’s “downward glance.” The reader knows that he is deeply enmeshed in Proust’s world when such a comment makes perfect sense. In terms of depiction of life during the Third Republic, my natural inclinations favor Marcel Pagnol, and how I still long for those hikes near Aubagne. What on earth am I doing reading about the social climbing and pecking orders of the various “titled,” and truly idle rich? Furthermore, I found some historical inaccuracies in depicting the Dreyfus affair in conjunction with the renting of motor cars and the overflight of airplanes. But then Proust, and it can be only Proust, answers with passages such as the following: “…similarly the female flower that stood here would coquettishly arch her ‘style’ if the insect came, and, to be more effectively penetrated by him, would imperceptibly advance, like a hypocritical but ardent damsel, to meet him half-way.” For only Proust understands that the essential complement to an Aubagne hike is an ardent damsel, a quaint expression that resonates through the ages, from “Proust time” to now. 5-stars

In this volume Proust's novel takes a sophisticated turn, after which all narratives and people change radically.

Awesome book, no problems with delivery.

Proust!, settle down and learn . One of the all time great authors.

Deep, historical, repetitive, novel that is often difficult to understand

A brave book that deals extensively with... shall we euphemistically call it man-man love (and which Proust, himself a man-man person, called "inversion")? There's an interesting philosophical passage on the nature of inversion through history. We learn more about the amorous tastes of M. de Carlus, how he comports himself in society, who is in on his secret and who isn't, and how the narrator himself (ostensibly a man-woman kind of guy) interprets this lifestyle. He also becomes insanely jealous that his mistress is herself involved with woman-woman interests. A young piano player becomes a main character in the book, and he develops a strange relationship with M. de Carlus. Interesting conversations in trains, including dissections of the etymologies of various place names, often puny hamlets and villages. And the introduction of a motor car (and driver) for put-putting around the countryside! Strangely, this book had very few new words for me to learn, very different from the previous books in the series. Oh well.

Volume IV of "In Search of Lost Time" begins in the afternoon of the day of Princess of Guermantes's party, the one that Marcel had looked forward for so long as his definitive entrance into the world of high society. That afternoon, by spying on them, Marcel discovers with his own eyes, for the first time, homosexuality, in the form of an encounter between the depraved Baron de Charlus and the tailor Jupien, Marcel's neighbor in the property of the Guermantes. Later that evening, Marcel attends the party, attended also by a cast of characters like very few in literature: Charlus himself, a Swann close to his death, and others. The Dreyfuss cause keeps winning adepts, among them the very Prince and Princess of Guermantes, as the injustice of the sentence is revealed. In the party, Marcel continues on his way to disappointment about noblesse: they are people just like everyone else, only with grand names and big egos, but not much more. Days later, with his mother, Marcel returns to Balbec, where, alone in his room he finally feels all the weight and sorrow of his grandmother's death, which had happened a year and a half before or so. It is a profound passage about the perception of death, everyday indifference to it, and the memories left to us by our beloved's passing away. In Balbec, Marcel reencounters with Albertine, in that perverted play of seduction and deceit, of attraction and rejection, which foreshadows a sick relationship. Disturbed by the graphic discovery of homosexuality, Marcel broods a lot about it. Two women who stay at the same hotel, and who openly show their lesbianism, awaken in Marcel a deep suspicion about Albertine's mysterious life, and so begins a torment of permanent jealousy, of anxiety and anguish which reminds the reader of the similar episode, in times gone by, of the beginning of the relationship between Swann and Odette. Meanwhile, Marcel has simultaneous relationships with a couple of maids of the hotel (literally simultaneous). Marcel rents a car to go around with Albertine through the countryside and the coast, deepening his relationship with the capricious, naughty, annoying and elusive Albertine. In her company, he begins to frequent the little band of the social-climbing Verdurins (where Swann had met Odette years before), in the country estate they have rented from the Marquises of Cambremer. The central part of the book narrates that summer in Balbec and its surroundings, above all the wide mosaic of characters surrounding the Verdurins: insecure but arrogant Doctor Cottard and his simple wife; musician Vinteuil; the rustic and silent sculptor Ski; Professor Saniette, pathetic and constantly humiliated; and Madame Verdurin herself, presumptuous and increasingly successful in society. Over this fresco is shown the repulsive couple of Charlus and musician Morel, son of a former servant of the Prousts. Morel is the worst kind of climber and representative of sexual and moral corruption. In contrast with what happens in the first three volumes, here it seems that it is the nobles who yearn to be accepted in bourgeois society, and not the other way around. It is the bourgeois who attract interesting people: intellectuals, scientists, artists. Charlus makes a fool of himself big time, pretending everybody ignores his homosexuality, when in fact he is the target of cruel jokes and gossip. So continues the great saga of memory, sex, love, longing, and social observation of the XX Century. Like in no one of the previous volumes, in this one the subject of homosexuality is analyzed in all its complexity. Marcel and Albertine's relationship forebodes hell. Charlus begins to sink. The bourgeois approach triumph. Like in all the previous volumes, what astounds the reader is Proust's immense power of microscopic vision to analyze individuals and dissect societies. It includes a magical reflection on dreams, as well as precious depictions of landscapes, sexual assaults, personalities and emotions.

"Sodom and Gomorrah," the fourth volume of Proust's masterwork "In Search of Lost Time," contains two very long set pieces that strike me as amazing achievements in the entire canon of literature. The first is an evening party at the mansion of the Prince and Princess de Guermantes attended by Proust's young narrator despite his doubt about having been properly invited, and the second is a dinner at the seaside clifftop house of the Verdurins filled with absurd but fascinating conversation. These episodes combined cover hundreds of pages of narration yet never give the impression of being stretched because Proust evokes the natural importance in every detail and human gesture, as though the course of the world depended on every little thing that transpires. These details unify under the banner of the entire novel into a series of fictionalized memories of Proust's social life as a young man making his way through Parisian aristocratic circles and observing the events which develop his artistic conscience. These memories tend to be romanticized visions of the past, wistful dreams of what he might have really wanted his life to be: "We dream much of paradise, or rather of a number of successive paradises, but each of them is, long before we die, a paradise lost, in which we should feel ourselves lost too." The title of the volume implies love between men and women, and men and men, and women and women. Here, the young Marcel chronicles the torrid romances of the Baron de Charlus, brother of the Duke de Guermantes, whose salon was the focal arena of the previous volume. Upon his spying--innocently, not judgmentally--on de Charlus and Jupien the tailor in an act of sodomy, he expounds on the societal attitudes confronting male homosexuality and on the ways de Charlus must go about procuring younger men for himself, such as he does with a conceited young violinist named Morel. Meanwhile, Marcel's love affair with Albertine, the pretty girl whom he met at the seaside resort of Balbec in Volume II, is progressing slowly but not smoothly. He notices that she, as Odette used to do with Charles Swann, is beginning to play games with his propensity for jealousy, flirting first with a girl named Andree and then with Marcel's friend, the soldier Saint-Loup. As the volume wraps up, Marcel resolves to marry her, hoping to draw her away from her Sapphic inclinations. Proust portrays a wide range of colorful supporting characters, who I have no doubt are based on people he knew in real life. While staying at Balbec, Marcel meets an eccentric family named Cambremer whom the lift-boy at the hotel mistakenly but amusingly calls Camembert and whose acquaintance provides a springboard for the dinner at the Verdurin estate. Here we experience the personalities of the physician Cottard, whose preoccupation with his Verdurin invitations affects his professional ethics; the shy, socially graceless Saniette, who is continuously bullied by Verdurin; and a pedantic bore named Brichot, who talks almost exclusively about the etymology of place names. The motifs recurring in this volume include the society-enveloping controversy over the Dreyfus affair, the snobbery involved in invitations to certain salons, and Marcel's association with the aging and ill Swann and his wife Odette, who now have some hard-earned esteem in the Faubourg Saint-Germain. In his deeply contemplative approach to narration, Proust functions as an essayist as much as he does a novelist, but his genius is that he merges both forms seamlessly. His sentences, at least as translated into English by Moncrieff and Kilmartin, are consistently worthy of applause and inspire me to write with more sensitivity to my surroundings.

his is volume four of Marcel Proust’s, “In Search of Lost Time.” I assume that, if you have made it this far, that you intend to read to the end – however, if you are thinking of starting this and have not read the earlier books, then do please begin at volume one. This is not a literary experience to be rushed and you need to read these volumes in order. The first volume concentrates largely on childhood memories, while volume two and three looks at society and status. Here, though, the narrator turns his attention to more daring and explicit themes; including forbidden and jealous love. In fact, jealousy is a theme which runs through this whole series; from Swann and Odette to his obsessive desire for Gilberte. Now we have his infatuation with Albertine and also the viewed lives of other characters; dissected with sharp clarity and laid bare. Indeed, the book begins with the narrator witnessing a hurried encounter between Jupien and Baron de Charlus in his courtyard and Charlus prowls through the pages of this book as we encounter him again and again. As for our narrator, there are late night, frantic desires to see Albertine, desires for her friend, Andree and sudden wishes to be free of the restraints of his feelings, while almost clinging to the distress he causes himself. Again, there are musings on the narrator’s beloved grandmother, his relationship with his mother and with those around him. There is also the return of the Verdurins and their clique, which the narrator becomes involved in. He spends time at Balbec, before returning to Paris at the end of this volume. However, it not so much what happens, but how Proust writes about it which is what makes these works so powerful. His writing is lyrical, beautiful and, despite the passing of time, all too understandable. We have all experienced these feelings of jealousy, desire and these aspects of human nature and behaviour and, through understanding them, sympathise with the people who come alive within these pages. I am glad I finally got around to reading, “In Search of Lost Time,” and look forward to reading on.

VERY GOOD PAGE LAYOUT, AND REPRODUCES PROUST'S FRENCH VERY WELL. AVOID THE PENGUIN EDITION.

received on time and enjoy the book

Arrived in immaculate condition, thank you very much!

Excellent series