Swann's Way
My newest bookshelf entry reviews Marcel Proust's Swann's Way.
Marcel Proust is the writer to whom I have returned most often over my life. Now that Audible.com is at last releasing an unabridged audiobooks edition of Remembrance of Things Past, I am returning once more.
One of Proust’s great themes is the transformation of personality across time. Our earlier selves cannot begin to imagine our later selves; our later solves are baffled if not horrified by our earlier selves. Swann’s Way, the first novel in the great novel series, ends with the eponymous Swann marveling at his own earlier life:
"To think that I have wasted years of my life that I have longed for death, that the greatest love that I have ever known has been for a woman who did not please me, who was not in my style!"
On each of the half dozen times I’ve read Swann’s Way, I’ve taken something different. Proust would of course say, that’s because I am different.
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