Yesterday I happened to read about someone's view that Proust wasn't really a novelist, but an essayist in disguise. That seems kinda right. Swann is about obsession, Jeunes filles is about living in the world - loves, friendships, restaurants and so on. Guermantes is about aristocracy and snobbery.
The thing I find really funny is while I (and lots of others who are more serious learned than me) love reading this book, it really doesn't make any sense that it should be so good. If one tries to describe this volume, it sounds completely odious (as opposed to all three of the books in Swann, which are just amazing in the things they tell you about what it is to be human). I'm reading a book about a man who is introduced into aristocratic circles. The sentences usually contain about twenty clauses that I have to keep in mind in order to loop them all back up before I can go on to the next, equally convoluted, idea. Often I fail and have to start the sentence over again two or three times before I can move ahead (the difficulty in this case being exacerbated by reading in a second language, but I think it would be almost the same - reading Henry James was a bit like that in English). A huge amount of the book is taken up with a discussion of how people I've never heard of are related to other people I've never heard of and how these connections make each connectee ever more illustrious. Some of these people were real, some fictional, and some might have been real except maybe Proust got his details mixed up (and of course it's part of his genius that he mixes fact and fiction and really doesn't care -- he's above worrying about attributing a real story about Manet to a made-up character). Aside from that there are major sections devoted to who visits who, including such sub-topics as people who visit certain others only because they are close family, where otherwise that person would not be fashionable enough for them to visit, people who are visited by certain people but don't visit them back, charity drop-in visits, the excuses a person may come up with for why they cannot possibly invite some particular would-be visitor because that person is so unpleasant, or of such low rank, that it would be disastrous to have them at your table or in your salon. Then Proust provides special insight into the mean and silly things that fashionable people say about unfashionable people. I suppose they were the celebrities of the time, and it's no weirder than people who obsess over the marriages of boring rock stars now. But I don't read People, let alone furrowing my brow and devoting this kind of time and energy to it.
The main attraction is simply the way he puts words next to each other. Two things that turn these ridiculous tales into good story-telling: his dissection of the vanities and the fears of his characters is insightful and therefore entertaining, and the trick of the dual narrator, who is scornful as he tells you the story, but who is honest enough to depict his past self as totally impressed and awed. A brilliant essayist can entertain with any topic. The moments of awe were most tightly packed (for me) in Swann but there are more still here than in almost anything else I've ever read.
