Warwick's Reviews > In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower

The only book I've ever abandoned after the first sentence.

And what a sentence! But I'll come back to that. Let me first hasten to defend myself, to present my credentials, because I realise that Proust is held in such high esteem as to be almost beyond criticism – not in the real world of course, that would be ridiculous, but on Goodreads certainly. Of the 29 Goodreads friends who have rated this, 25 give it five stars, three give it four stars – one (the only French reader) gives it three. That is an astonishingly high proportion of full marks.

So my apologies to all of you. I plead only the right to a subjective opinion, one that has not been arrived at trivially. My history with Proust is as follows. I read Swann's Way very slowly over a period of several weeks, a reading experience memorable mainly for the fact that my girlfriend kept waking me up because I had dozed off halfway through a sentence. (Reading it in bed was probably a mistake.) There was a lot I liked about it, but I admit I didn't quite grasp what all the fuss was about. I thought it insightful in parts, trite in others. It was also plotless and self-indulgent, but those things don't bother me on their own.

The real problem was the prose style.

For someone revered as a stylist, Proust to me seemed irritating at best, at worst barely readable. I am prepared to accept that this is my problem. In my notebook from that year I divided the page into two columns headed ‘Awesomeness’ and ‘Awkwardness’ to try and clarify in my mind the different reactions I was getting to his sentences. But I gradually got fixated on the second category. Phrases like

I was well aware that I had placed myself in a position than which none could be counted upon to involve me in graver consequences at my parents' hands

strike me as being not just recondite, but fundamentally unsound – in English, and I stress that caveat because I'm aware that there may be a translation issue going on. This kind of construction plays better in French, and although I do read French, I happened to read Proust in translation just because I have a Folio Society set of the Moncrieff/Kilmartin/Enright version. If you're going to tell me that this all flows more prettily in the original, I'm prepared to believe you. I think.

After I finished Swann's Way, my dubious reaction to it niggled at me. Surely I was missing something? As a rule I'm not someone who likes to follow popular opinion, but when so many people I respect seem to love this writer, maybe I have somehow failed to spot his essential charm…? So one day, several months later, I got the second volume down, poured myself a drink, sat in the garden and started reading. It opens:

My mother, when it was a question of our having M. de Norpois to dinner for the first time, having expressed her regret that Professor Cottard was away from home and that she herself had quite ceased to see anything of Swann, since either of these might have helped to entertain the ex-Ambassador, my father replied that so eminent a guest, so distinguished a man of science as Cottard could never be out of place at a dinner-table, but that Swann, with his ostentation, his habit of crying aloud from the house-tops the name of everyone he knew, however slightly, was a vulgar show-off whom the Marquis de Norpois would be sure to dismiss as – to use his own epithet – a ‘pestilent’ fellow.

I calmly closed the book again, got up, went inside and put it back on the shelf, where it has remained. (I went back and finished my drink.)

I love the audacity of this sentence. That is the only thing I love about it, though. I feel that every native speaker who reads it must have the same jarring sense of dislocation when they reach the words ‘my father’, because it's natural when reading it to assume that ‘My mother’ is the subject of the sentence, albeit immediately diverted by two long subordinate clauses. But eventually (on the third scan, in my case) it dawns that the only verb governed by ‘my mother’ is ‘having expressed’, and that the main clause hasn't even started until you get to his father. So what Proust has done here is to postpone the grammatical subject of his sentence until fifty-four words in. For the opening sentence of a novel! (And it introduces five separate characters!)

This is an unusual construction, to say the least. X having done Y, A did B is unremarkable; but introducing a subordinate clause set off by commas immediately after X leaves you hanging on, open-mouthed, for a finitive verb, and hence obscures the meaning. I understand that there are people who adore this style of writing and find it charming or delicate. I don't though, I find it deeply unfriendly. More than that, I find it somehow…creepy.

This is not because of the opacity itself. Because I'm a journalist, and because I like thinking about the mechanics of sentence structure, some friends have accused me of being overly harsh on writers who do not go for clarity and efficiency at all times. I do respect those qualities, but I deny the charge. I love complicated baroque prose styles, and there are plenty of writers who use Proustian effects in ways that move and excite me – Henry James, Thomas Pynchon, oh there's dozens really. It's really just Proust himself that leaves me cold. It's something to do with the intricate formal correctness of it – as though he's saying, ‘Claim to be confused by this if you must; I can assure you it adheres to all the rules.’ There is an over-earnest quality, a sickly intricacy, to his sentences. They seem to be made all of elbows.

The way he expresses himself is somehow true to the letter of language, without being true to its spirit. (At least in translation.)

So that's my experience of him. I'm sorry, but I am just constitutionally unable to get past the extreme ponderousness of expression to enjoy his flashes of insight. That's not to say that I've given up on Marcel, and when I have some more time I hope to try him again in French. But for now at least…he's staying on the shelf.