In Search of Lost Time: Sodom and Gomorrah V. 4

I am writing here of the "Penguin Proust" translation by John Sturrock. (Much of what appears on this page is misleading, with the editorial matter referring to an audiobook and many reader reviews to an earlier translation. Even first-sentence quote is not from Sturrock's translation!) Of the four Penguin Proust volumes I've read so far, this is my favorite--a wonderfully funny study of society (if not of sex). Proust specializes in transformations. We'll be introduced to a character and led to believe that we know everything of importance about him, only to have him turn up in a later volume as entirely different. In this volume, the remote and terrible Baron de Charlus is tranformed a pathetic tubby, besotted by the pianist Morel (himself a bit of a transformation, since he first appeared in the novel as the son of a valet). Marcel (the narrator) meanwhile finds himself more deeply involved with Albertine, herself probably a stand-in for a male secretary of Proust's, Alfred Agostinelli. To complicate matters, I see elements of this relationship not only in the Marcel-Albertine affair, but also in the Charlus-Morel romance. It's as if Proust divided his experience into two parts, giving the romantic elements to Marcel and the comic part to Charlus. The two romances come together at the seaside salon of the awful Madame Verdurin, who is inexorably rising in the world. In one of Proust's hundred-page setpieces, the aristocratic baron has his first clash with the social-climbing Verdurins. I found myself cheering for Charlus, whom I'd earlier learned to dislike, because he is so genuine and she is such a fraud. And I know in my heart (and through my earlier readings of this great novel) that things are not going to turn out well for Charlus. Against all logic, Proust in one of his hundred-page dissections of French society is able to keep me on tenterhooks. The less said about Albertine, the better. I am not one of those who find her/him a convincing character. So it is with a bit of apprehension that I now turn to volume five of the Proust Penguin, containing the two books of the "Albertine cycle." But back to Sodom (as it were): this is a wonderful translation of a riveting story. If you stick with "In Search of Lost Time" thus far, you will know that you are in the middle of one of the great experiences of your life.

"Sodom and Gomorrah," the fourth volume of Proust's masterwork "In Search of Lost Time," contains two very long set pieces that strike me as amazing achievements in the entire canon of literature. The first is an evening party at the mansion of the Prince and Princess de Guermantes attended by Proust's young narrator despite his doubt about having been properly invited, and the second is a dinner at the seaside clifftop house of the Verdurins filled with absurd but fascinating conversation. These episodes combined cover hundreds of pages of narration yet never give the impression of being stretched because Proust evokes the natural importance in every detail and human gesture, as though the course of the world depended on every little thing that transpires. These details unify under the banner of the entire novel into a series of fictionalized memories of Proust's social life as a young man making his way through Parisian aristocratic circles and observing the events which develop his artistic conscience. These memories tend to be romanticized visions of the past, wistful dreams of what he might have really wanted his life to be: "We dream much of paradise, or rather of a number of successive paradises, but each of them is, long before we die, a paradise lost, in which we should feel ourselves lost too." The title of the volume implies love between men and women, and men and men, and women and women. Here, the young Marcel chronicles the torrid romances of the Baron de Charlus, brother of the Duke de Guermantes, whose salon was the focal arena of the previous volume. Upon his spying--innocently, not judgmentally--on de Charlus and Jupien the tailor in an act of sodomy, he expounds on the societal attitudes confronting male homosexuality and on the ways de Charlus must go about procuring younger men for himself, such as he does with a conceited young violinist named Morel. Meanwhile, Marcel's love affair with Albertine, the pretty girl whom he met at the seaside resort of Balbec in Volume II, is progressing slowly but not smoothly. He notices that she, as Odette used to do with Charles Swann, is beginning to play games with his propensity for jealousy, flirting first with a girl named Andree and then with Marcel's friend, the soldier Saint-Loup. As the volume wraps up, Marcel resolves to marry her, hoping to draw her away from her Sapphic inclinations. Proust portrays a wide range of colorful supporting characters, who I have no doubt are based on people he knew in real life. While staying at Balbec, Marcel meets an eccentric family named Cambremer whom the lift-boy at the hotel mistakenly but amusingly calls Camembert and whose acquaintance provides a springboard for the dinner at the Verdurin estate. Here we experience the personalities of the physician Cottard, whose preoccupation with his Verdurin invitations affects his professional ethics; the shy, socially graceless Saniette, who is continuously bullied by Verdurin; and a p

The fourth volume of "In search of lost time" (Sodom and Gomorrah) begins with the sickness of Marcel's grandmother's sickness, which will lead her to the grave. During the dissease she will be treated by doctor Huxley, whose behavior surrounding the woman's unavoidable death awakens Marcel's digressions. Once she dies, the story resumes his contact with the high spheres of society. Marcel travels once again to Balbec, where he finds Albertine again. Their relationship grows as they assist to Mme. Verdurin's gatherings. Her "wednesdays", as she calls them, now that she attends in Balbec to her group of friends. Marcel's mind games surrounding Albertine are comparable to those utilized by Charlus to manipulate his young lover, the son of an old servant of his (Marcel's) grandfather... who plays the violin. Marcel is involved in this relationship as an comunicating vessel between Charlus and his "Adonis". It is rather curious how telephones, automobiles and trains are more and more involved in the telling of the events. The encounters in the stations, the dangers of traveling in an automobile, the unpersonalized feel to talking to someone through a telephone, etc... All these entail not only technological changes, but social ones as well: how people relate to one another begins to be considered outside the reduced space of fixed spheres... now, they move all over the space, they can even be broken into pieces... their voices, their bodies, the possibility of an effective transport that also allows privacy and secrecy (such as Marcel and Albertine's travels in the car, and all the implied events surrounding this machine -involving Charlus and his young "friend").Marcel's doubts about Albertine's likes, are more overwhelming everyday... and he finally decides to marry Albertine, to take her to Paris with him.In this volume, Marcel Proust submerges deeper in the waters of human affections and desires. If in the second volume he began to experience love for the first time, in this one, he is experiencing love outside the protection of young idelism and romanticism... instead, he realizes the conection between love, desire, snobism and pain: the truth of love is far from being an eternal, selfless and happy feeling: it is the constant haunting of a question, the everlasting wonder about evil within and without.It is most memorable when Marcel assists to a party and describes the unfixed nature of gender differentiation: how much can a woman look like a man, how much can a woman desire another woman... and how much like a woman can one man desire another man.

In the previous volume of Proust's IN SEARCH OF LOST TIME, Marcel was poised at the pinnacle of social success as he readied himself to attend the Princesse de Guermantes' party. Those alabaster gates that from a distance appeared to be the entry to paradise actually opened only onto a continuing pageant of human folly. Early in the book, a chance peek out the window shows the elegant Baron de Charlus to be a pervert as he romances the servile Jupien. Even his beloved Duchesse de Guermantes "allowed the azure light of her eyes to float in front of her, but vaguely, so as to avoid the people with whom she did not wish to enter into relations, whose presence she discerned from time to time like a menacing reef in the distance."Marcel retreats from the social whirl and returns to Balbec, the scene of WITHIN A BUDDING GROVE. There he takes up again with Albertine and, after hobnobbing with the Guermantes, now joins Mme Verdurin's "little band" of opinionated second-raters. This was the same salon at which Swann had met Odette in SWANN'S WAY. You may recall that Swann discovered that Odette was multiply unfaithful to him, yet married her anyway.In SODOM AND GOMORRAH, it is Marcel who is drawn ever closer to Albertine. As the book draws to a close, he discovers from a chance remark that Albertine claims close friendship with two lesbians one of whose trysts Marcel had witnessed years before in Combray. Just as Swann had agonized just before deciding to wed Odette, Marcel sees the death of his hopes and of any chance for joy in his young life. "As by an electric current that gives us a shock, I have been shaken by my loves. I have lived them. I have felt them: never have I succeeded in seeing or thinking them. Indeed I am inclined to believe that in these relationships ..., beneath the outward appearance of the woman, it is to these invisible forces with which she is incidentally accompanied that we address ourselves as to obscure deities."During this, my second reading of IN SEARCH OF LOST TIME, I continue to marvel at Proust's mastery. The scene of a social gathering that occupies two hundred pages, and takes me two or three days to read, seems to pass by in the blinking of an eye.

Four years ago, I decided that I would begin reading Proust'sIn Search of Lost Time; however, the idea of reading straight throughall seven parts of the novel was somewhat daunting and I decided toread one part per year. Of course this plan had its drawbacks. How would I keep all Proust's characters straight? How could I recall after a year's passage all the details that the author so painstakingly included in his work? After finishing the fourth part, I am amazed to discover that not only were characters, which were introduced to me three years ago, recalled with ease, but the narrator's intense musings were as equally accessible. Proust's ability to paint indelible images and ideas onto the memory of his readers is probably his greatest talent. The fourth part of the novel follows the narrator as he returns to Balbec for the second time and is introduced into the world of homosexual activity (which Proust refers to as "inversion") and the affected salons of provencial France. In this volume, The Baron Charlus assumes a major role in the novel and Marcel realizes that his jealousy of his lover, Albertine, is reflective of the jealousy of Swann for Odette (it might sound like a soap opera, but it is definitely not). Whether Sodom and Gomorrah is better or worse than the earlier parts of the novel is not important as a recommendation or criticism; it makes up an integral part of the whole and cannot exist without the other parts. Proust is not easy reading and demands the undivided attention of the reader; as I am becoming aware, the effort put into reading the novel is eminently rewarding. So pour yourself a little Pernod and begin an undertaking that you will never forget.