The Guermantes way

by Marcel Proust

Other authorsMark Treharne (Translator)
Hardcover, 2004

Status

Available

Publication

New York : Viking, 2004.

Description

An authoritative new edition of the third volume in Marcel Proust's epic masterwork, In Search of Lost Time Marcel Proust's monumental seven-part novel In Search of Lost Time is considered by many to be the greatest novel of the twentieth century. This edition of volume three, The Guermantes Way, is edited and annotated by noted Proust scholar William C. Carter, who endeavors to bring the classic C. K. Scott Moncrieff translation closer to the spirit and style of the author's original text. Continuing the story begun in Swann's Way and In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, The Guermantes Way follows Proust's young protagonist as he advances through aristocratic French society in late-nineteenth-century Paris. A departure from the intimacy of the sprawling novel's previous two installments, part three unfolds against a colorful backdrop of Parisian life, moving from literary salon to opulent social gathering to provide a biting and satirical commentary on culture, human foibles, the ways of the world, and the irretrievable loss of time.… (more)

Media reviews

The Birmingham Post
"The Guermantes Way” (Chatto 7s 6d each volume) is a literal enough rendering of “ Le Cotes de Guermantes” but it hardly suggests the richness of atmosphere which the author’s strange genius imparted to the brilliant salon life in the French capital before the war

User reviews

LibraryThing member BookAngel_a
I'm gradually working my way through Proust's 7 volume series, In Search of Lost Time. This book, The Guermantes Way, is volume 3 of 7.

In part one of this volume, our hero and his family move into the Guermantes Hotel. He becomes enchanted with the Duchess de Guermantes and begins to dream about
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what her life is like. He starts to plan his day so that he 'accidentally' bumps into her. She realizes what he is doing and despises him. He pays a lengthy visit to Saint-Loup and gets to know SL's friends, and his mistress. He makes his first ever telephone call.

In part two, his beloved grandmother falls ill and dies. Albertine re-enters his life, and he tries to embark on a romance with a mystery woman. He has an interesting encounter with de Charlus again. By the end of the book, he finds himself finally accepted into the high society of the Guermantes family - and it is much more ordinary than he expected it would be.

Proust continues to delve into human minds and behavior. There's a lot of hypocrisy in these books...people who act one way when they are really feeling differently. The narrator exposes them wonderfully.

As usual, Proust's prose is beautiful. And relaxing. I find myself being lulled to dreamland by his words.

I keep mentioning what an EASY read these books are! If you are intrigued by Proust but have been too intimidated to start - just TRY the first one, Swann's Way. You might be surprised.
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LibraryThing member evangelista
"We are attracted by any life which represents for us something unknown and strange, by a last illusion still unshattered."

On the last day of the year, I finished The Guermantes Way, the third volume of Marcel Proust's magnum opus, In Search of Lost Time. At the beginning of the book, nothing much
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has changed. Our protagonist is a bit older but still the sensitive and self-obsessed youth that we came to know in Swann's Way and In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower. He has eschewed the intellectual life, and is attempting to ingratiate himself with the aristocratic Guermantes family. The text is peppered with sharp insights attributed to the narrator but seemingly outside his scope of emotional or intellectual insight. Or perhaps the narrator has far keener powers of perception when it comes to others than he does with himself. Some favorites:

"The alleged 'sensitivity' of neurotic people is matched by their egotism; they cannot abide the flaunting by others of the sufferings to which they pay an ever-increasing attention in themselves."
His impressions of the social pecking order at the theatre:

"For the folding seats on its shore and the forms of the monsters in the stalls were mirrored in those eyes in simple obedience to the laws of optics and according to their angle of incidence, as happens with those two sections of external reality to which, knowing that they do not possess any soul, however rudimentary, that can be considered analogous to our own, we should think ourselves insane to address a smile or a glance: namely, minerals and people to whom we have not been introduced."
And a foreshadowing of what he is to learn of the aristocracy whose company he craves:

"I realised that it is not only the physical world that differs from the aspect in which we see it; that all reality is perhaps equally dissimilar from what we believe ourselves to be directly perceiving and which we compose with the aid of ideas that do not reveal themselves but are none the less efficacious."
The beginning of the book is a trifle frustrating as the reader is delivered much more of the same from the first two volumes. But then, the curtain, both figurative and literal in some cases, is lifted and we see where Proust is to take us next. The aristocracy is exposed as an illusion, that something strange and unknown that may be craved until its true nature is revealed. The social elite have become in many instances financially destitute as well as morally suspect and intellectually pedestrian. The story of the day, the Dreyfus affair, becomes an instrument with which they may exclude their Jewish friends from their inner circle.

As Marcel becomes more and more disillusioned with the life he has chosen for himself, the hand of the writer shows through the text revealing a Proustian belief that great art is created in isolation. Social climbing amidst a vacant and decaying aristocratic set can yield nothing but a time drain whose reversal could yield a creative product of great worth.

There is much to love here. The nearly 100 page long description of one afternoon in the salon of Mme. de Villeparisis is masterful, written as if in real time with all the subtle machinations one expects from Proust. The language as always is entrancing, languorous and lovely. And just at the end, just as one begins to wonder if more of this same loveliness will be required, all of this disillusionment and social strife comes to a head in the story of M. Swann again, and one yearns to see the new direction in which this story might turn. So I will read on. Perhaps the last three volumes in 2010.
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LibraryThing member lauralkeet
Finishing The Guermantes Way marks the halfway point in Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time, a journey I began about a year ago. For this reader anyway, Proust is best read in small doses of 10-20 pages, so the flowery but dense prose can be understood, digested, and appreciated. And yet, this
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volume challenged me in the "appreciation" department. I enjoyed the first part of the book, where Marcel visits his friend Robert de Saint Loup at his military barracks, and spends time with Robert and his rather colorful mistress. There were also some very moving scenes involving Marcel and his grandmother. However, a central theme of this book revolves around the social hierarchy and various forms of snobbery, as demonstrated in an afternoon at a salon (described in 100 pages of detail), and a dinner party (200 pages!). It took everything I had to soldier on to the end, where there was a payoff that piqued my interest in the next volume. But I need to take a nice, long break so I can approach it with fresh enthusiasm.
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LibraryThing member P_S_Patrick
The third part of the Search for Lost time, and also the longest, I didn't enjoy this as much as the first two. It perhaps lacks some of the excitement that the first two have in their storyline, and when this is combined with certain scenes that seem to go on for ever, it is just a bit harder to
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get into. What can still be appreciated though is the humour, and the same quality of writing as the first two, but I think many readers will find some sections of this book boring. However, in a work four thousand pages long, it would be surprising if a uniform and outstanding quality were to be maintained throughout, I am just hoping that the remaining volumes return to brilliance.
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LibraryThing member jorgearanda
In this volume Proust shifts topics and mounts an analysis of our pursuit of status. His narrator climbs through the higher levels of the social hierarchy and finds himself in conflict between the natural pull of the aristocracy and its self-absorbed, vain, pedestrian core. Powerful and brilliant,
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as the previous two volumes, though perhaps slightly less engaging at the start.
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LibraryThing member Leonard_Seet
More than a commentary on Swann’s jealousy or M. Charlus’s homosexuality or the frivolity of the Guermantes’ sorties, Marcel Proust’s monumental work In Search of Lost Time paints the unsuccessful reconstruction of a forgone world and a lost existence from fickle memories, which like
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morning mists would fade with the rising sun. The narrator Marcel, longing for a past that didn’t exist but must be created, sought to experience Bergson’s continuous time rather than the fragmented and still-framed instantaneous moments by attempting to blur the boundaries between Cambray and Paris, childhood and adolescence, and Swann and himself and integrate here and there, before and after, and him and me through memory fragments of previous objects, people and sensations. As in a neural network or a mind-map, the madeleine linked his aunt to his mother, who in turn was linked to Albertine through jealousy, which also connected Marcel with Saint Loop and Swann, who, as with his (Marcel’s) grandmother, linked his childhood and adolescence. And through recollection, Marcel would try to relive the buried years and resurrect his grandmother and Albertine.

But even during the narrative, Marcel realized memory’s willfulness and the variation in hues, shapes, pitch and timbre between the actual object and its mental reconstruction. When he encountered an old friend, the facial features were so different from his recollection and reconstruction, for better or for worse pregnant with all the emotions, preoccupation, biases, that he could not match face with voice.

Because recollected sensation can never equate with the actual experience and time, like a patient thief, steals memories a morsel at a time until one day the owner would realize he was ruined, Marcel ultimately would fail to recapture and assemble stolen sensations and decayed seconds and in the end, must create new moments, new sensations and ultimately a new biography, through the synergy between past experiences and creative imagination. From those deceased hours and decayed memories sprouted In Search of Lost Time, not only Proust’s novel but also that of the narrator.

Whether we savor Marcel’s frailness, Swann’s infatuation, Charlus’s pompousness, Franscoise’s independent-mindedness, the sorties’ frivolousness or the social revelation of the Dreyfuss Affair, we can enjoy Proust’s classic without resorting to Marxist or Freudian or Feminist critique. And the sentences, like the serpentine Amazon, seemed to flow unceasingly into the distant horizon carrying with it the sparkling sunlight. Although ascending the novel’s three thousand pages appears precipitous, the effort will be well worth the while and, at the end of the adventure, the reader can rest on the crisp apex and savor time’s transience and memory’s playfulness as if they were alpine zephyrs.
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LibraryThing member stillatim
Much of GW is about snobs being snobs, denying that they're snobs, and the fact that their lives are often much better for their beings snobs: they have better clothes, better food, better taste in art and much, much better conversation than the benighted bourgeois boobies. This is fitting, because
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this volume of Proust is really for Proust snobs only, the type of person who relishes 800 page books which mostly describe nothing much other than a couple of parties (see also: Marias' 'Your Face Tomorrow' trilogy). Is this exciting? For the vast majority of people, no. But for we snobs (who will always deny our snobbery, which is how you know we really are snobs), this is the very pith of life. It's funnier, and more intricate and more moving than the preceding volumes. It's also irritatingly long-winded, sometimes poorly organized, and often utterly baffling.

I sum up 'The Guermantes Way' this way: at one point Proust's narrator suggests that society would "become secretly more hierarchical as it became outwardly more democratic." Shortly afterwards he launches into a long song and dance about how the Duchess de Guermantes performs in public, saying things that are contrary to conventional wisdom almost purely for the purpose of increasing her own notoriety. This kind of double-edged humor reaches its height in the closing pages, which are simultaneously the funniest and must disturbing I've ever read- but look almost completely innocuous at first blush.

This volume is also notable because Proust makes it clear that, for all his perspectivalism when it comes to truth, he believes that a genuine, authentic understanding of each other is possible, because "sometimes in this life, under the stress of an exceptional emotion, people do say what they think."
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LibraryThing member roblong
My least favourite volume so far, which is not to distract from how good some of it is. The writing at its finest moments is breathtaking (it would give things away to mention what they are), but I did lose some interest during the most drawn out dinner parties. The book is very cynical about the
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society it studies, but is doubtless justified in being so. I assume that the journey from worship to scorn of high society mirrors Proust's own - and he makes a thoroughly convincing case.
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LibraryThing member leslie.98
2.5* for the book, 3* for the Neville Jason narration of the audiobook edition

Proust is too long-winded for my tastes hence my lowish rating. When I finish reading/listening a bit, I would paraphrase what had happened during that section & the plot, such as it is, was interesting to me but it was
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like panning for gold to get to it. Neville Jason did a fine job with the narration - it isn't his fault that the book kept sending me to sleep!
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LibraryThing member japaul22
In volume 3 of In Search of Lost Time, the narrator goes back to Paris where he finds a new woman to obsess over, the Duchesse of Guermantes. The narrator follows her on her morning walks, hoping to be noticed and invited to a dinner at her home. He does have a connection with her; his friend
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Robert Saint Loup is her nephew. Saint Loup is stationed at Doncieres with the army and the narrator goes down to meet up with him. There is a great section with the narrator interacting with the soldiers.

Back in Paris, there are two long set pieces at parties that sort of build on and contrast with each other. The first is at Mme Villeparisis's house and the second is at the Duchesse of Guermantes (finally!!). In the middle there is a long section on the death of the narrator's grandmother. The dinner party at Mme Villeparisis's is pretty entertaining to read - lots of familiar characters and a few new, talk of the Dreyfus affair, and an appearance by the highly intriguing Baron de Charlus at the end. The section at the Duchess's home was pretty boring, but it occurred to me that that was sort of the point - the fascinating-from-afar Duchesse of Guermantes is in reality quite boring and predictable (though still striking in her presence). I like how Proust chooses ordinary objects to create a thread through the novel. Some of these recur through all of the volumes (so far), like the hawthorn bush, and some are present in one section only (like the hats at the parties or the Elstir works of art). Some seem to have some deep significance and I think that some really are just memory triggers. It's a neat effect.

I'm really enjoying this book. This volume was very character-driven which was a little easier to read than some of the dreamier diversions in the previous two volumes and it was a nice change. I'm still very much seeing the work as a whole and not as separate volumes. I kind of want to go right on to the next volume, but as I have some other reading plans in July, I think I'll stick with my schedule and wait til August.
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LibraryThing member amerynth
After finishing The Guermantes Way, the third volume in Marcel Proust's "In Search of Lost Time," my opinion of the author hasn't changed. He's clearly brilliant and has interesting things to say, but boy, I really wish he would get on with it sometimes.

This third installment brings our narrator
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to yet another obsession with a woman for no apparent reason.... he becomes more creeptastic with each novel. The more interesting segments of the novel deal with high society and the narrator's disappointment upon finding that the circle he longs to be in is filled with snobs.

Proust's prose is beautiful and challenging... enough that I need a bit of a break before heading onto then next book in the series.
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LibraryThing member Cecrow
In the same sense as a writer's writer, a comedian's comedian, etc., Proust's unnamed narrator is a daydreamer's daydreamer. His diligent categorization of minutiae goes beyond the surface detail of simple occurrence or observation, plumbing the depths of that instant in time or a passing turn of
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phrase, turning the everyday into the epic. This is particularly in keeping with the third volume's theme which explores his desire to enter society, symbolized by his joining the Guermantes' salon. The narrator justifies his longing, arguing that achieving the highest social standing should surround him with a correspondingly elevated degree of intelligence and originality that he wants to maximize his exposure to, but there's a hole in his theory. Just as with prior anticipations, he imagines it will be like diving into the deep waters of Plato's land of ideals but finds himself in the kiddie pool.

I was much more conscious this time of how the narrator lays claim to perfect knowledge. Frequently he is reading minds, relating the very thoughts of others. While the story is always told in first person, there are things only an omniscient narrator could know, such as what Rachel is actually plotting or will do when the narrator is not around, and the way that he relates two separate conversations line for line in a drawing room, happening simultaneously and at opposite room ends that he could not possibly both be following. The narrator's commentary on those conversations is also flawless. He is either the most adept and insightful person in the room even at his young and inexperienced age, or we must allow he is able to combine perfect memory with carefully studied retrospection. This first person omniscient perspective makes it difficult, if not impossible, to judge or assess the narrator as a character. I do not know if he is admiring or poking fun at society, if he is being objective or being judgmental of women, etc. Consequently, I can't even say whether I like him or empathize with him. I choose to trust him as being faithful to what he is depicting, and that's as far as it goes. To the extent that he does exist as a character, I'm not entirely convinced of the means by which he gets access to this highest echelon of society. He seems a bit surprised himself, so perhaps that will emerge later.

There's not as many observations this time on the nature of memory that hit home with me; although I've had the same experience of some sound or event happening as I'm recalling something unrelated, followed by having that become a trigger to recall the same unrelated thing on another occasion. Some other observations he makes which seem deeply insightful could be taken as critiques of fiction under a thin veneer. When he observes that old loves do not actually disappear from one's life forever but tend to crop back up, that's observant of life; or it's a critique of how many novels quietly shuffle an unwanted character offstage and conveniently never feel the need to reintroduce him/her again. Where the narrator's romances are concerned, they continue to be a haunting reflection of my own experiences in a way that is almost maddening. I have to believe he is just that good, that he can write in such a way to make anyone feel it relates to whatever their own story may be.

Proust can be funny, as when Oriane speaks of her cousin: "I always ask myself, when she comes here, whether the moment may not have arrived at which her intelligence is going to dawn, which makes me a little nervous always." (Only to be surpassed later by her brother-in-law: "You offer your hindquarters a Directory fireside chair as a Louis XIV bergere. One of these days you'll be mistaking Mme de Villeparisis' lap for the lavatory, and goodness knows what you'll do in it.") Proust can also be exasperating. As the Guermantes are sitting down to dinner and are about to engage in conversation, the narrator chooses this moment to dive into a sixty page digression about their general treatment of guests and whatnot. It might be the longest dinner party every recorded in fiction. The ending is sharp: the joke with the envelope, and then the prioritization of a social event - or the shoes to be worn to one - over the death or dying of friends. This strange ordering of values was itself about to die off, and none too soon.
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LibraryThing member Ghost_Boy
Proust is one writer I feel like I can relax when I read him. Hoping to read the next volume soon this year, need a little break though.
LibraryThing member SeriousGrace
As Proust's narrator grows up his narrative becomes drier and less whimsical. There is a larger focus on French society and the titles within it. We move beyond intimate portraits of individuals, but Proust is careful to let his narrator grow through the people he meets and the obsessions he
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develops. TI was struck by the genius of lines well delivered. For example, "Perhaps another winter would level her with the dust" (p 275). In the end I found myself asking, how do you cope with a love that is held only by the games one plays? Is this a form of emotional hostage-taking? What will become of one so enamored with another?
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LibraryThing member lschiff
What a combination of beautiful scenes, near slapstick comedy, sharp social and political insight and too often endlessly boring accounts of upper class conversations. The section describing his grandmother's death is incredibly moving, the most lovely writing in the three volumes I've read so far.
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His detailed descriptions of the salon is worthy of any ethnographer using the participant observation method of research. In fact, while I was working my way through the famous dinner at the Guermantes' I kept thinking of Proust as a sociologist as opposed to novelist, though the two professions are quite complementary so maybe he can wear both hats. After a bit of a well-earned break I will most definitely be forging on to volume 4.
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LibraryThing member pmtracy
Proust’s writing is like a rich dessert; I really enjoy it but I can only have a little at a time. The imagery and language is really engaging but it’s so deep and layered that I really need to slow down and decompose what I’m reading. During the socialite scenes, I spend a lot of time trying
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to mentally build the genealogical charts of all the guests which is a challenging exercise. I have the next volume in hand but I think I’m going to let this one settle a bit and maybe add more Proust to my list for end of 2017.
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LibraryThing member SaraPrindiville
A lot about the Dreyfus affair- Judaism. A lot about obsession and then the let down once one finds out the person is not as you imagined. His grandmother died. That was painful- she also became different than she had always appeared to be. I can't wait for more!
LibraryThing member buttsy1
Having spent a great deal of time and energy to get "entree" to the Parisian upper class, the narrator realises that they are, by and large, like everybody else, except richer, and more inclined to snobbery.
My advice to the narrator: now that M. de Charlus has shown his true colours, keep well away.

Language

Original language

French

Barcode

1397

Other editions

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