Month: January 2026

In a novel, I find that I tend to look for easy reading – something that I can pass my time with, and enjoy my time while it’s also quite light to read. I look for a setting and perspective. Contrarily, Proust’s novel immediately dived into the narrator discussing his dreams, which had me questioning, where are we? What is the purpose? What is happening? Therefore, the first couple paragraphs were quite confusing and required some acclimitization. I’m someone who likes to imagine the exact scene in my head as described in the novel, so for a novel like Proust’s with such dense descriptions and shifting focal points, I found it more time consuming than usual, since it seems like so much is going on at the same time.

Professor Jon, other reviewers, and several bloggers talked about the difficulty of reading this novel, so I went in with those expectations as well. While “Combray” isn’t exactly the longest chapter in the world, it’s certainly dense. There are many descriptions to consider, and these sentences aren’t something one can just skim and hope to understand. Proust’s novel lived up to the expectations of being a ‘difficult read’, and one that is not so easily read. It was definitely a challenge, and while Proust paints scenes with vivid imagery, it was hard for me to grasp exactly what the prose was about. However, after watching the lecture video, I understood a little bit better (not fully, though).

The narrator flits in and out of sleep, flying through various dreams and ‘rooms’. He also discusses quite a deal about his family – I particularly enjoyed the part where he discussed mother’s goodnight kiss (p. 13), nd continues to discuss it further on (p. 27-29). At that point, I don’t think the age of the narrator was mentioned, so hearing this anectode and the way his father disproved of it gave me more perspective on the narrator, leading me to believe he was in his 10s or so. There was one specific passage that made me reflect upon my own actions:

But even with respect to the most insignificant things in life, none of us constitutes a material whole, identical for everyone, which a person has only to go look up as though we were a book of specifications or a last testament; our social personality is a creation of the minds of others. Even the very simple act that we call “seeing a person we know” is in part an intellectual one. We fill the physical appearance of the individual we see with all the notions we have about him, and of the total picture that we form for ourselves, these notions certainly occupy the greater part. In the end they swell his cheeks so perfectly, follow the line of his nose in an adherence so exact, they do so well at nuancing the sonority of his voice as though the latter were only a transparent envelope that each time we see this face and hear this voice, it is these notions that we encounter again, that we hear. (p. 19)

This is more of a pyschological(?) analysis, but it made me think about perception and image. Someone’s version of their ‘identity’ can shift entirely based off someone else’s perception. What’s actually going on in the chapter feels quite plain, like family gatherings and dreams, but since the narrator describes them with such detail, it feels as though he’s ascribed deeper meaning to these otherwise ordinary happenings. As they say, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. If I were in the narrator’s position, I don’t think I would remember this many details, or even my dreams with such vivid imagery.

Something I kept on thinking about throughout this entire reading was the translation. The descriptions are so fanciful, and Proust immediately drags readers into the world he has created. It made me think, how beautiful would the prose be in the source language? How long must the translators have taken to accurately translate the text in such detail, while still retaining the meaning? Translating is not simply a 1:1 word for word machine – the translator must understand what is being written, and translate (and often localize) the text as necessary. For such a difficult read like Combray, how deeply did the translators understand this? I like to think about the intricacies behind translation and localization since I also read translated fictional novels for fun, and dabble in translation myself (and this will be a recurring thought throughout the term as well). I truly respect the work that the translation team must have put in for this.