Proust, Marcel. Remembrance of Things Past. “Cities of the Plain” Translated by C.K. Scott Montcrieff. Chatto and Windus, 1961.
Reason read: to continue the series started in honor of Proust’s birth month.
All of the usual suspects are back in volume seven of Remembrance of Things Past. Swann, Guermantes, Gilberte, and Albertine are alive and well. Proust delves deeper into human emotions and behaviors in Cities of the Plain. This time he explores sexual deception in the form of homosexuality as a pact sealed with Gomorrah. A great deal of the action takes place at Guermantes’ party. The narrator is not even sure he wants to go to the shindig, but he’s also not sure he has been invited. A certain snobbery permeates the narration. Words like scandal, society, position, connexion (sp), privilege, exclusivity, eminence, aristocracy, class, glamour, regal, and influence pepper the pages.
As an aside, I am growing weary of Proust’s long-winded-ness. The man can go on and on. Here is just one example, “It is with these professional organisations that the mind contrasts the taste of the solitaries and in one respect without straining the points of difference, since it is doing no more than copy the solitaries themselves who imagine that nothing differs more widely from organised vice than what appears to them to be a misunderstood love, but with some strain nevertheless, for these different classes correspond, no less than to diverse physiological types, to successive stages, in a pathological or merely social evolution” (p 27).
His obsession with sleep and memory continues. I do adore the illustrations by Philippe Jullian.
Best line of the book, “Everybody becomes different upon entering another person’s house” (p 207).
Author fact: according to the web, Proust was influenced by Flaubert.
Book trivia: Sodom and Gomorrah is the French title for Cities of the Plain.
Playlist: Beethoven
Nancy said: Pearl didn’t say anything specific about Cities of the Plain because she only mentions Remembrance of Things Past.
BookLust Twist: from Book Lust in the chapter called “Romans-Fleuves” (p 208).
~*LunaSea*~ 