Hey guys- welcome back to this absolutely enthralling reading blog. For this first week, we’ve all been reading Combray by Proust, whose writing I’ve found to be pretentious at its best moments and downright insufferable at its worst. Alright, that might be a little harsh; there were plenty of passages in this book that I found to be beautifully written and that I genuinely enjoyed. I did notice, however, that Proust’s rambling, detailed style of prose tended to wear me down the more I read. It felt like his overly wordy descriptions of landscapes, events, or relationships often could have been expressed in half as many words, without losing all of their poetic charm. Sometimes I could feel myself getting lost in a particular sentence and having to go back over it a couple of times in order to glean its full meaning.

That being said, there were parts of Combray that pleasantly surprised me, such as the entertaining nature of its characters, who I found to be much more whimsical and absurd than I’d imagined. I found the narrator’s aunts Flora and Celine quite funny, for instance, for their apparent “deafness” to any topic of conversation that they considered “boring” or “normal”. The thought that their ears literally stop functioning at the discussion of the mundane is a brilliantly obnoxious addition to their characters. As well, I found that Francoise’s relationship with Aunt Leonie stood out, especially Francoise’s disdain for the other servants in the house. The fact that Francoise cannot feel pain for a real, proximate human being, but breaks into tears at the thought of a stranger’s suffering, is another amusing piece of character description. One of the scenes that made me laugh was on page 124, where she breaks down while reading the medical description of the kitchen maid’s condition in a book, while simultaneously showing complete indifference to the kitchen maid’s real life pain in the interactions between them.

While there is something distinctly Freudian about the narrator’s attachment to his mother, her goodnight kiss in particular, I read this neediness as more of a natural childhood anxiety. This is a time when one is strongly attached to their parents and, for fear that something bad might happen to them and that they might be left alone, feels the constant need to be in their presence. The narrator’s elaborate schemes to say good night to his mother, even when circumstances don’t allow it, reminded me of my own childhood clinginess and disregard for reason. I found Proust’s description of childhood relatable in many other senses, like when he is reprimanded for visiting his Uncle Adolphe’s house without permission. The childhood innocence that prevents you from knowing why something is wrong, and the shame that comes after the scolding, is something that Proust does a beautiful job of describing. At times, it felt like I was living inside this child’s stream of consciousness, which was both entertaining and disorienting.

My question- what did you think of the child’s attachment to his mother- Freudian or part of a general childhood neediness?