in search of remembrance of things past

I have got myself in a complete muddle with Marcel Proust.  You may think that it serves me right. In Search of Lost Time, also translated as Remembrance of Things Past, is notoriously long, with a gigantic cast of characters, and sentences that famously go on for what seems like entire paragraphs, if not whole pages.  It's not known as light reading, and talking about the fact that I'm tackling it could be taken as a form of showing off.  Look at me, I'm so highbrow, I read Marcel Proust for fun.

In fact, I started in a spirit of curiosity, because like many people I'd heard of the famous madeleine as a trigger to memory, and even talked about it myself, without actually having read the book, and that is posing.  So one day I downloaded part one, Swann's Way, as a free Kindle download, and started reading.  That's the great thing about having free access to classics on the internet, you can give them a go.  My kindle contents list reveals that in the case of Don Quixote and the collected works of Byron, giving it a go has not got beyond the first one per cent, while I have made numerous train journeys without so much as starting on Moby Dick, but with Swann's Way I kept reading.  Proust's observations of human behaviour, and his dissections of human motives, are so acute that they draw you in.  I coped with the long sentences and meandering structure by dint of letting it flow over me and reading fast.

At the end of part one, I was still happy to keep going, and downloaded a free part two.  Time seemed to be passing along in leaps and bounds, and I was struggling to keep up with the cast of characters at times, but hey, it was Proust.  Again, his actute, candid and catty account of how they all felt about the situations they found themselves in, not always what according to convention they ought to have felt, was so compelling, I kept clicking on to the next screen, until I got to the end.  Albertine, the narrator's girlfriend, had done a runner.

I had to pay for part three.  Proust seemed to have looped back in time, since his narrator was now laboriously trying to get to know characters that he'd been on dining terms with in part two. Still, given its reputation as a difficult book I wasn't unduly worried.  Why should it have a linear narrative structure?  Maybe Proust was saying something about all our moments being present at once in our memories.  The dinner party did go on a bit, and I disliked some of the upper class characters so much that I had to take a break from their company periodically, but Proust skewering the moment at which somebody discovers that one of their friends has a terminal illness just as they are going out to dinner, and are stuck in the social dilemma of whether to offer comfort to the dying man or avoid being late to the dinner party is one that will stick in my mind for a long time.  If you like Jane Austen, you will love Proust.

The awful truth struck when, trying to work out which volume I should buy next, having run out of free ones, I looked In Search of Lost Time up on Wikipedia, and discovered that I had been reading it in the wrong sequence.  Not all the right words, and not in the right order.  My free part two was actually part four, Cities of the Plain, also translated as Sodom and Gomorrah, and the Captive, also translated as The Prisoner.  Part three was indeed part three, which I'd read after part four, but I'd skipped over part two, which explained the slightly bewildering onslaught of unfamiliar names.

That was exceedingly dim of me.  I can see how it happened: I wasn't familiar with the work at all, and driven by my desire for free content was mixing and matching from different publishers, while the descriptions on Amazon of the various Kindle editions were brief and, as it turns out, misleading.  The fact that some of the volumes have been translated under more than one title added to my confusion.  I have now invested the princely sum of one pound and fifty three pence in buying the whole seven volumes, so that I can go through catching up on the part I missed out, before progressing to parts six and seven.  I don't think that was available when I started off, otherwise it would have been by far the best way of doing it at the outset.

So, buyer beware when trying to assemble a complete copy of Remembrance of Things Past on the cheap.  I wouldn't worry about the length, though.  So much is made of it being a long book, one million two hundred and sixty seven thousand and sixty nine words according to Wikipedia, but it's only about the same as reading the whole of the Barsetshire chronicles and probably shorter than the assembled works of Terry Pratchett or Agatha Christie, and nobody would be impressed because you'd read those in their entirety.