The first volume of Proust's epic is one of those classic masterpieces that actually turns out to be pretty good read as long as some overzealous college prof isn't force feeding it to you in a week. Also, given that it's a deeply psychological book about the magic of memories built up over a lifetime, it helps not to be 19 years old anymore. Remind me again why exactly they so often ruin the classics for us the way freshman rush ruins tequila?
The prose itself is truly described by that most overused of adjectives: lyrical. In the first part of the book (Combray 1 and 2) it is so dense as to border on poetry and practically requires reading aloud to really hear properly. It's not until you reach the second part (Swann's Way) that you find yourself following something more akin to the plot of a novel. True, not much actually happens. But then that's life in a nutshell, no?
What caught my attention even more than the craft of language though, were all the strange shifts in images -- houses that become faces, feelings that become songs, paintings that become people. The novel has an interesting way of raising every piece of the world to an aesthetic height where it becomes related to every other piece. This of course is probably the main theme it has to offer; the book in general is a reflection on how our imagination and memory are the submerged iceberg extending far below the surface of our experience and constantly shaping it.
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