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    The Guermantes Way
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    The Guermantes Way
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    The Guermantes Way
    Audiobook28 hours

    The Guermantes Way

    Written by Marcel Proust

    Narrated by Neville Jason

    4.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    Remembrance of Things Past is one of the monuments of 20th century literature. Neville Jason’s widely praised abridged version has rightly become an audiobook landmark and now, upon numerous requests, he is recording the whole work unabridged which, when complete, will run for some 140 hours. The Guermantes Way is the third of seven volumes. The narrator penetrates the inner sanctum of Paris high society and falls in love with the fascinating Duchesse de Guermantes. Proust describes vividly the struggles for political, social and sexual supremacy played out beneath a veneer of elegant manners. He also finds himself pursued by the predatory Baron de Charlus.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherNaxos Audiobooks
    Release dateApr 1, 2012
    ISBN9781843796114
    Author

    Marcel Proust

    Marcel Proust (1871-1922) was a French novelist. Born in Auteuil, France at the beginning of the Third Republic, he was raised by Adrien Proust, a successful epidemiologist, and Jeanne Clémence, an educated woman from a wealthy Jewish Alsatian family. At nine, Proust suffered his first asthma attack and was sent to the village of Illiers, where much of his work is based. He experienced poor health throughout his time as a pupil at the Lycée Condorcet and then as a member of the French army in Orléans. Living in Paris, Proust managed to make connections with prominent social and literary circles that would enrich his writing as well as help him find publication later in life. In 1896, with the help of acclaimed poet and novelist Anatole France, Proust published his debut book Les plaisirs et les jours, a collection of prose poems and novellas. As his health deteriorated, Proust confined himself to his bedroom at his parents’ apartment, where he slept during the day and worked all night on his magnum opus In Search of Lost Time, a seven-part novel published between 1913 and 1927. Beginning with Swann’s Way (1913) and ending with Time Regained (1927), In Search of Lost Time is a semi-autobiographical work of fiction in which Proust explores the nature of memory, the decline of the French aristocracy, and aspects of his personal identity, including his homosexuality. Considered a masterpiece of Modernist literature, Proust’s novel has inspired and mystified generations of readers, including Virginia Woolf, Vladimir Nabokov, Graham Greene, and Somerset Maugham.

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    Reviews for The Guermantes Way

    4.5/5

    37 ratings8 reviews

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    • 5/5
      What a delightful read! This is the third in the series I’ve read, and I think it’s my favorite so far. Proust’s humor is first rate.
    • 4/5
      More than a commentary on Swann’s jealousy or M. Charlus’s homosexuality or the frivolity of the Guermantes’ sorties, Marcel Proust’s monumental work In Search of Lost Time paints the unsuccessful reconstruction of a forgone world and a lost existence from fickle memories, which like morning mists would fade with the rising sun. The narrator Marcel, longing for a past that didn’t exist but must be created, sought to experience Bergson’s continuous time rather than the fragmented and still-framed instantaneous moments by attempting to blur the boundaries between Cambray and Paris, childhood and adolescence, and Swann and himself and integrate here and there, before and after, and him and me through memory fragments of previous objects, people and sensations. As in a neural network or a mind-map, the madeleine linked his aunt to his mother, who in turn was linked to Albertine through jealousy, which also connected Marcel with Saint Loop and Swann, who, as with his (Marcel’s) grandmother, linked his childhood and adolescence. And through recollection, Marcel would try to relive the buried years and resurrect his grandmother and Albertine.But even during the narrative, Marcel realized memory’s willfulness and the variation in hues, shapes, pitch and timbre between the actual object and its mental reconstruction. When he encountered an old friend, the facial features were so different from his recollection and reconstruction, for better or for worse pregnant with all the emotions, preoccupation, biases, that he could not match face with voice.Because recollected sensation can never equate with the actual experience and time, like a patient thief, steals memories a morsel at a time until one day the owner would realize he was ruined, Marcel ultimately would fail to recapture and assemble stolen sensations and decayed seconds and in the end, must create new moments, new sensations and ultimately a new biography, through the synergy between past experiences and creative imagination. From those deceased hours and decayed memories sprouted In Search of Lost Time, not only Proust’s novel but also that of the narrator. Whether we savor Marcel’s frailness, Swann’s infatuation, Charlus’s pompousness, Franscoise’s independent-mindedness, the sorties’ frivolousness or the social revelation of the Dreyfuss Affair, we can enjoy Proust’s classic without resorting to Marxist or Freudian or Feminist critique. And the sentences, like the serpentine Amazon, seemed to flow unceasingly into the distant horizon carrying with it the sparkling sunlight. Although ascending the novel’s three thousand pages appears precipitous, the effort will be well worth the while and, at the end of the adventure, the reader can rest on the crisp apex and savor time’s transience and memory’s playfulness as if they were alpine zephyrs.
    • 4/5
      I'm gradually working my way through Proust's 7 volume series, In Search of Lost Time. This book, The Guermantes Way, is volume 3 of 7.In part one of this volume, our hero and his family move into the Guermantes Hotel. He becomes enchanted with the Duchess de Guermantes and begins to dream about what her life is like. He starts to plan his day so that he 'accidentally' bumps into her. She realizes what he is doing and despises him. He pays a lengthy visit to Saint-Loup and gets to know SL's friends, and his mistress. He makes his first ever telephone call. In part two, his beloved grandmother falls ill and dies. Albertine re-enters his life, and he tries to embark on a romance with a mystery woman. He has an interesting encounter with de Charlus again. By the end of the book, he finds himself finally accepted into the high society of the Guermantes family - and it is much more ordinary than he expected it would be.Proust continues to delve into human minds and behavior. There's a lot of hypocrisy in these books...people who act one way when they are really feeling differently. The narrator exposes them wonderfully.As usual, Proust's prose is beautiful. And relaxing. I find myself being lulled to dreamland by his words. I keep mentioning what an EASY read these books are! If you are intrigued by Proust but have been too intimidated to start - just TRY the first one, Swann's Way. You might be surprised.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      In this volume Proust shifts topics and mounts an analysis of our pursuit of status. His narrator climbs through the higher levels of the social hierarchy and finds himself in conflict between the natural pull of the aristocracy and its self-absorbed, vain, pedestrian core. Powerful and brilliant, as the previous two volumes, though perhaps slightly less engaging at the start.
    • 4/5
      "We are attracted by any life which represents for us something unknown and strange, by a last illusion still unshattered."On the last day of the year, I finished The Guermantes Way, the third volume of Marcel Proust's magnum opus, In Search of Lost Time. At the beginning of the book, nothing much has changed. Our protagonist is a bit older but still the sensitive and self-obsessed youth that we came to know in Swann's Way and In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower. He has eschewed the intellectual life, and is attempting to ingratiate himself with the aristocratic Guermantes family. The text is peppered with sharp insights attributed to the narrator but seemingly outside his scope of emotional or intellectual insight. Or perhaps the narrator has far keener powers of perception when it comes to others than he does with himself. Some favorites:"The alleged 'sensitivity' of neurotic people is matched by their egotism; they cannot abide the flaunting by others of the sufferings to which they pay an ever-increasing attention in themselves."His impressions of the social pecking order at the theatre:"For the folding seats on its shore and the forms of the monsters in the stalls were mirrored in those eyes in simple obedience to the laws of optics and according to their angle of incidence, as happens with those two sections of external reality to which, knowing that they do not possess any soul, however rudimentary, that can be considered analogous to our own, we should think ourselves insane to address a smile or a glance: namely, minerals and people to whom we have not been introduced."And a foreshadowing of what he is to learn of the aristocracy whose company he craves:"I realised that it is not only the physical world that differs from the aspect in which we see it; that all reality is perhaps equally dissimilar from what we believe ourselves to be directly perceiving and which we compose with the aid of ideas that do not reveal themselves but are none the less efficacious."The beginning of the book is a trifle frustrating as the reader is delivered much more of the same from the first two volumes. But then, the curtain, both figurative and literal in some cases, is lifted and we see where Proust is to take us next. The aristocracy is exposed as an illusion, that something strange and unknown that may be craved until its true nature is revealed. The social elite have become in many instances financially destitute as well as morally suspect and intellectually pedestrian. The story of the day, the Dreyfus affair, becomes an instrument with which they may exclude their Jewish friends from their inner circle.As Marcel becomes more and more disillusioned with the life he has chosen for himself, the hand of the writer shows through the text revealing a Proustian belief that great art is created in isolation. Social climbing amidst a vacant and decaying aristocratic set can yield nothing but a time drain whose reversal could yield a creative product of great worth.There is much to love here. The nearly 100 page long description of one afternoon in the salon of Mme. de Villeparisis is masterful, written as if in real time with all the subtle machinations one expects from Proust. The language as always is entrancing, languorous and lovely. And just at the end, just as one begins to wonder if more of this same loveliness will be required, all of this disillusionment and social strife comes to a head in the story of M. Swann again, and one yearns to see the new direction in which this story might turn. So I will read on. Perhaps the last three volumes in 2010.
    • 4/5
      The third part of the Search for Lost time, and also the longest, I didn't enjoy this as much as the first two. It perhaps lacks some of the excitement that the first two have in their storyline, and when this is combined with certain scenes that seem to go on for ever, it is just a bit harder to get into. What can still be appreciated though is the humour, and the same quality of writing as the first two, but I think many readers will find some sections of this book boring. However, in a work four thousand pages long, it would be surprising if a uniform and outstanding quality were to be maintained throughout, I am just hoping that the remaining volumes return to brilliance.
    • 4/5
      My least favourite volume so far, which is not to distract from how good some of it is. The writing at its finest moments is breathtaking (it would give things away to mention what they are), but I did lose some interest during the most drawn out dinner parties. The book is very cynical about the society it studies, but is doubtless justified in being so. I assume that the journey from worship to scorn of high society mirrors Proust's own - and he makes a thoroughly convincing case.
    • 5/5
      A lot about the Dreyfus affair- Judaism. A lot about obsession and then the let down once one finds out the person is not as you imagined. His grandmother died. That was painful- she also became different than she had always appeared to be. I can't wait for more!