Combray (or, Memories of a Mommy’s Boy)

At last, I have finished Marcel Proust’s Combray. Forty-nine pages felt like a lifetime, and I attribute this to there being sentences that went on for longer than this blog post. Apparently, using periods wasn’t common practice in early 20^th century France and semicolons were all the rage. I did enjoy it though I think, once I got though it all.

The hilarity of Swann being basically a kind of villain in the narrator’s eyes because he was a guest, and guests prevented the narrator’s mother from kissing him goodbye just might have made the whole thing worth it. Poor boy. His love for his mother was certainly endearing but it did break my heart a bit when his sadness was seen as nervous condition. The only good that came from that was that it allowed the narrator to “cry without sin” which isn’t much considering his sobs the night his mama slept beside him “never really stopped” it’s just that he could only hear them when “life became quieter around [him]”. Honestly, I think it was the descriptions of his sorrows that made me stick around because the conversations the adults were having were, sorry-not-sorry, often quite dull. The fact that this also a semi auto-biographical recounting of Proust’s own childhood also piqued my interest.

It was funny to me though that Swann is actually part of high society and dines with princesses etc and the narrator’s great-aunt and whole family think he is middle-class and send him running around doing chores basically. The whole family was rather amusing honestly. I also thought the structure of the story, while confusing at first was clever as it played out how a memory would. The more we learn, the more is remembered and revealed. I also learned a lot of words from this one: benumbed (deprived of physical or emotional feeling), ignominious (deserving of public disgrace), demimonde (people at the fringes of high society) and cocotte, (an oven or a fashionable prostitute).

And of course, the infamous madeleine scene. I had similar experience once, when I ran out of body lotion and put on some random leftover one I had, and bam, suddenly it was summer before senior year. I’m disappointed that my experience didn’t involve “render[ing] the vicissitudes of life unimportant to me” or made me “cease to feel mediocre, contingent, mortal,” though, but I’m happy that was the case for Proust I guess. In any case I now at least know what vicissitudes (changes in unpleasant circumstances) are. Poor boy honestly, so much suffering just for a goodnight kiss.