As much as I would’ve loved to have completed this reading for my blog post, I found myself runnings out of time with some other things that were going on :\ I haven’t finished Combray yet (I plan to by Thursday’s class to discuss), however, I have read enough to get a gist of Proust and his writing style.
Thoughts:
Firstly, I absolutely love the way this book is written, and the many themes it touches on. The introduction really captured me, with Proust imploring the feelings of being alone with memory and emotion by conveying experience through an almost ‘out of body’ style narrative detailing his early childhood. I love the extreme length of this sentences – I think I read in the preface that Proust was actually fond of sentences that were too long as to fully capture the extent of an emotion of feeling. I can actually relate to this, as I tend to write longer sentences to fully capture feelings without the distraction of an interruption or a period.
As such, I found that the best way to read Proust was to actually not read every word of the sentence, but rather to gloss over each sentence to get a sense of the feeling Proust tries to convey.
I really liked the humanness of the themes explored (thus far), and I found myself gasping at how he seemed to capture the little nuances of very human experiences in his sentences, ie. the feelings of being alone in a dark room and drifting away into memory. I really liked how abstract memory is portrayed, and I really liked how he described the relationship between him and his mother where we could really understand the importance of her love and the result of its lack (though I’m only on page 32 and haven’t fully seen what happens later in the novel).
Regardless, I absolutely love stories where the writing implores the reader to read between the lines and begs the reader to read beyond the words that are just written. It also makes sense to me that his writing come off as ‘confusing’, as I feel like it is in the nature of such emotions and experiences that they cannot be fully explored in words and require more from the reader to relate to or to understand – maybe even more experiences in their own lives.
I’ll update this blog once I finish – but there are my thoughts so far! What emotion did you find that you could relate to in this story?