I went into reading “Combray” fully prepared to be confused, and yet somehow, I was still caught off guard by just how confusing it was. This was not a light “oh, I’ll just read a few pages before bed” kind of text. This was a sit-up-straight, reread-the-same-sentence-four-times, question-your-intelligence kind of read. Proust’s sentences feel like they physically refuse to end, and more than once I found myself forgetting how a sentence even started by the time I reached the period.
At first, I thought I was reading it wrong. I kept stopping, rereading, and trying to piece together connections, assuming that if I just concentrated harder, everything would suddenly click. It didn’t. Eventually, I realized that maybe that sense of being lost is part of the experience. “Combray” doesn’t really care if you’re comfortable as a reader. It pulls you into the narrator’s mind, which is messy, obsessive, emotional, and constantly drifting, much like actual memory.
The famous madeleine scene is the clearest example of this. One small taste unleashes an overwhelming flood of memories, emotions, and images. I found this both fascinating and slightly unrealistic, mostly because I personally cannot remember what I ate yesterday, let alone have an entire childhood resurrected by a pastry. Still, the idea that memory can exist so powerfully beneath the surface, waiting to be unlocked by something mundane, felt strangely convincing.
Another part that stood out to me was the narrator’s intense fixation on the goodnight kiss from his mother. What could easily be dismissed as childish dramatics is treated with complete seriousness. The anxiety feels all-consuming, almost unbearable, and Proust never minimizes it. Instead, he seems to suggest that these early emotional patterns don’t disappear, they simply evolve and follow us into adulthood.
That said, there were moments where the level of detail felt excessive. Pages spent on rooms, paths, names, and minor characters sometimes made me wonder what I was supposed to hold onto and what I was allowed to forget. Still, maybe that’s the point. Memory isn’t efficient, linear, or selective in a neat way.
Ultimately, I didn’t enjoy reading “Combray” in a traditional sense, but I don’t think I was meant to. It’s frustrating, overwhelming, and oddly intimate, and maybe that discomfort is exactly what makes it work.