Violet wells's Reviews > In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower
In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower
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It's brilliant; it's a bit boring; it's brilliant again; it's a bit boring again.
This book covers his initiation into sexual desire and romantic love, beginning with his obsession with Gilberte and ending with his summer sojourn on the Normandy coast where he falls for another unattainable girl. At times, because of the way he's mollycoddled by his family, it's hard to conceive of him as being much older than ten. It thus comes as a shock that he's capable of intellectual discourse and predatory sexual feeling. I enjoyed this volume less than the first. Maybe at the time some of his ideas about desire - of it being essentially projection - were novel but, though there are some gems of insight, I often found his formulations on the subject long-winded and even banal at times. And I've come to dread the advent of another set of brackets on his pages - I think I'm yet to find anything he puts in parentheses anything but an annoying distraction. Once or twice I found myself wishing Proust had lived an outwardly more interesting life - though there's no denying that he milked out every drop of nectar given to him.
I remember a startlingly brilliant passage about a sunrise seen from the sleeping car of a train. I remember a fantastic passage when he conceives of his feeling as being much grander and more momentous than the view of the sea and sky, as if there is more reality inside him than in the entire external universe. I remember a brilliant passage when he comes to conceive of desire as an inward journey with knowledge of self as the real and ultimate destination. And there's lots of great stuff about both the transfiguring and deluding powers of habit.
Onto volume three…
This book covers his initiation into sexual desire and romantic love, beginning with his obsession with Gilberte and ending with his summer sojourn on the Normandy coast where he falls for another unattainable girl. At times, because of the way he's mollycoddled by his family, it's hard to conceive of him as being much older than ten. It thus comes as a shock that he's capable of intellectual discourse and predatory sexual feeling. I enjoyed this volume less than the first. Maybe at the time some of his ideas about desire - of it being essentially projection - were novel but, though there are some gems of insight, I often found his formulations on the subject long-winded and even banal at times. And I've come to dread the advent of another set of brackets on his pages - I think I'm yet to find anything he puts in parentheses anything but an annoying distraction. Once or twice I found myself wishing Proust had lived an outwardly more interesting life - though there's no denying that he milked out every drop of nectar given to him.
I remember a startlingly brilliant passage about a sunrise seen from the sleeping car of a train. I remember a fantastic passage when he conceives of his feeling as being much grander and more momentous than the view of the sea and sky, as if there is more reality inside him than in the entire external universe. I remember a brilliant passage when he comes to conceive of desire as an inward journey with knowledge of self as the real and ultimate destination. And there's lots of great stuff about both the transfiguring and deluding powers of habit.
Onto volume three…
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Quotes Violet Liked
“No doubt very few people understand the purely subjective nature of the phenomenon that we call love, or how it creates, so to speak, a supplementary person, distinct from the person whom the world knows by the same name, a person most of whose constituent elements are derived from ourselves.”
― Within a Budding Grove
― Within a Budding Grove
“All our final decisions are made in a state of mind that is not going to last.”
― In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower
― In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower
“The time which we have at our disposal every day is elastic; the passions that we feel expand it, those that we inspire contract it; and habit fills up what remains.”
― In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower
― In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower
“Pleasures are like photographs: in the presence of the person we love, we take only negatives, which we develop later, at home, when we have at our disposal once more our inner dark room, the door of which it is strictly forbidden to open while others are present.”
― In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower
― In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower
“Our desires cut across one another, and in this confused existence it is rare for happiness to coincide with the desire that clamoured for it.”
― Within a Budding Grove
― Within a Budding Grove
“We imagine always when we speak that it is our own ears, our own mind, that are listening.”
― In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower
― In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower
“As a rule it is with our being reduced to a minimum that we live; most of our faculties lie dormant because they can rely upon Habit, which knows what there is to be done and has no need of their services. But on this morning of travel, the interruption of the routine of my existence, the unfamiliar place and time, had made their presence indispensable.”
― Within a Budding Grove
― Within a Budding Grove
“But one never finds a cathedral, a wave in a storm, a dancer's leap in the air quite as high as one has been expecting;”
― In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower
― In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower
“...for each of us sees clarity only in those ideas which have the same degree of confusion as his own.”
― In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower
― In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower
“That is why the better part of our memories exists outside us, in a blatter of rain, in the smell of an unaired room or of the first crackling brushwood fire in a cold grate: wherever, in short, we happen upon what our mind, having no use for it, had rejected, the last treasure that the past has in store, the richest, that which, when all our flow of tears seems to have dried at the source, can make us weep again.”
― In Search of Lost Time, Volume II: Within a Budding Grove
― In Search of Lost Time, Volume II: Within a Budding Grove
“With intelligent people, three-quarters of the things they suffer from come from their intelligence.”
― In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower
― In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower
Reading Progress
September 7, 2020
–
Started Reading
September 7, 2020
– Shelved
October 27, 2020
–
Finished Reading
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rated it 5 stars
Sep 16, 2020 03:50PM
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Do you plan on reading all In Search of Lost Time volumes?
Do you plan on reading all In Search of Lost Time ..."
Hopefully. Last time I didn't quite make it to the end.
I'm beginning to get the hang of how to read him.
It's the relentless intensity that can be exhausting, especially when certain ideas or observations don't warrant such intensity, Ilse. But then that's coupled with some of the best writing in the history of the novel.
Thanks Noel.
I'm struggling with the next volume, Fi!