Swann in Love: the middlebrow's Proust

He shall drink from the stream by the wayside
and therefore he shall lift up his head.

 I assisted at two masses and three baptisms today. I've said vespers (from whence the quote above comes, it's from Psalm 110 if you are interested) and I'm ready to unwind a bit.  I've gotten myself a helping of Tiramisu and some chilled grappa. I will almost certainly regret this later tonight but I feel like I owe it to Proust.

Let me give you some irresponsible advice. Advice that right-thinking people everywhere will deplore. My advice to those daunted by Proust is don't read the whole thing. Read just one small part of it. I'd go even further and say, listen to an audiobook of that one part. And don't ever feel obliged to read another page of Proust beyond that unless you really want to.

Not just any part mind you.

For years there used to be a little novel called Swann in Love by Marcel Proust (en Francais: Un amour de Swann) on the shelves at the bookstore and at the public library. If you tripped across it, as I did some thirty years ago now, you would think that this must be some shorter work that Proust wrote before launching into his epic novel. In fact, it is the second of three large sections that make up the first volume of À la recherche du temps perdu.

This little book was sold back in the day when being a middlebrow was still an acceptable thing. Nowadays, few openly admit to being a middlebrow. Many are in secret but that is another matter.

In any case, the little volume that is Swann in Love works very well as a stand alone book. Read it and you will have read enough to handle most cocktail chatter about Proust. In fact, you will notice, if you look about, that an awful lot of the critical commentary about Proust deals with this relatively small selection of the masterwork. (No one admits this but you can, and many do, read the thing by skipping over large sections of the novel. I'll probably suggest some options, a cheater's Proust as it were, as I blog along.)

Besides being a good standalone, Swann in Love also consists of a great little story that is easy to get hooked into, which not true of a lot of the rest of Proust. This selection is about love, obsession, sexual infidelity, girls having sex with other girls and lots of other great stuff.

By the way, I'd go even further and say, don't read but listen to it. There is a great little audiobook read by Sir Ralph Richardson of Swann in Love.  Unavailable for many years, it can now be purchased from iTunes. One of the really difficult things about Proust is "getting" his sentences. They often ramble on for most of a page with introductory clauses and long, long parenthetical clauses. Sometimes you have to stop dead and go back over a sentence several times to figure out what it is about. Sir Ralph reads the sentences so well you don't have any trouble understanding them, making it much easier to follow the action.

If you want to read Swann in Love, you may not have much luck finding it anymore. It has been a victim of the war on middlebrowism. Not to worry, simply buy or borrow the first volume of À la recherche du temps perdu. It's usually called Swann's Way in English. Then read just the middle section, helpfully called "Swann in Love". If it catches your interest, you can go back and reread from the beginning.

By the way, there is no shame in having only a single volume of the Novel on your shelf. If anyone asks, tell them that you are saving the rest for your retirement.