I recently reread Swann’s Way, the first volume of Marcel Proust’s novel In Search of Lost Time (this title is an accurate translation of Á la recherche du temps perdu, but the book was formerly called in English Remembrance of Things Past, a title I can’t get out of my head). In the close-to-forty years since I last read it, the text has changed somewhat: then I read Terence Kilmartin’s version of C. K. Scott Moncrieff’s translation, and now I read a masterful revision of that by D. J. Enright.
The book is in three parts: “Combray,” “Swann in Love,” and “Place Names · The Name.” In the first and third parts the nameless narrator muses on his youth, first in Combray, a fictional town not far from Paris, and then in Paris itself. The second part is devoted to recounting the amours of Charles Swann and Odette de Crécy, and is the only lengthy part of the entire seven-volume novel in which the narrator is absent.
There is a shocking ellipsis after “Swann in Love.” At the end of that part, Swann falls out of love. “Just as, before kissing Odette for the first time, he had sought to imprint upon his memory the face that for so long had been familiar before it was altered by the additional memory of their kiss, so he could have wished—in thought at least—to have been able to bid farewell, while she still existed, to the Odette who had aroused his love and jealousy, to the Odette who had caused him to suffer, and whom now he would never see again. He was mistaken. He was destined to see her once again, a few weeks later. It was while he was asleep, in the twilight of a dream.” The clear implication here is that Swann would never see Odette again. “Swann in Love” ends with Swann’s own thoughts: “To think that I’ve wasted years of my life, that I’ve longed to die, that I’ve experienced my greatest love, for a woman who didn’t appeal to me, who wasn’t even my type!” The episode seems to be over.
In “Combray” are some mentions of Swann’s wife, but we are not given her name. Because she is clearly disreputable, we are led to assume, in most of “Swann in Love,” that Mme Swann is actually Odette de Crécy, and that eventually she was able to persuade Swann to marry her, but we are not told so outright. The end of “Swann in Love” seems to put that idea out of the question: the Mlle Swann we’ve been reading about in “Combray” must be someone else, since Swann fell out of love with Odette and never saw her again.
But in the third part, it becomes suddenly clear (in a remarkable passage that quotes a conversation between a “pair of strollers,” almost an aside) that Mlle Swann is in fact Odette de Crécy. How did it happen that she became Swann’s wife when he had definitively fallen out of love with her, when, or so we are told, he would never see “the Odette who had aroused his love and jealousy” again? Proust gives us no idea. It is the most astonishing ellipsis.
Yet the novel is full of such ellipses. Transformations happen throughout but all too often we find out about them almost accidentally and without knowing how they came about. This is part of Proust’s genius: he casually shocks you with parenthetical revelations.
But there’s so much more than this here. The beauty of the prose is breathtaking (for instance, the several pages devoted to the Bois de Boulogne in autumn), the meditations on lost opportunities are moving, the social scenes are hilarious, and what it means to be in love is limned so painfully well.
I also read Joshua, the first book of the Prophets, in Robert Alter’s brilliant translation. This was not a rewarding experience: the book is half military conquests and half land assignments, with little of human interest.