Book review: Madame Swann at Home

Or, Within a Budding Grove, Book One. Which in French is "a l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs", from which I discover that "Madame Swann at Home" is really "Autour de Mme Swann"; "around Mme Swann" is perhaps better. Truely, translation is hard. Google offers me In the shade of young girls in bloom which fits the book but only works if it is fleur, not fleurs? Mfd; and independently a decade later M, offer "in flowery dresses", which also fits the book. Aanyway, enough of me displaying my ignorance of French, time to display my ignorance of literature.

I won't trouble to summarise the plot because there is none, and anyway the book has a handy synopsis at the end. We begin - I finished several weeks ago so details may be hazy - with Marcel mooning over Gilberte; he gains admittance to her house and weirdly ends up talking more to Swann and Mme; for no obvious reason he and Gilberte move apart; and we end with a beautiful scene of Mme S, out for a walk, being greeted by the clubmen of Paris; filtered through our narrator's memory; shaded by her parasol as though by a wisteria bower. I can forgive Proust for the tedium of some of his rambling because it is necessary to set up that last page.

Prefiguring his later mysterious ascendance into the FSG, Marcel - a callow teenager let us not forget - is somehow interesting enough that M and Mme Swann like to talk to him¹. Perhaps this merely reflects Proust's own valuation of literature. But it would explain why Gilberte gets pissed off with him. It doesn't explain why he decides to drop her; at least within the book, he fails to admit to being more interested in Mme than Mlle.

Various social interactions and asides are interesting. The inability of people to judge other people remains a theme; Swann leads a double life; "lowering himself" to talk to people who will "know" his wife, but secretly going out with the FSG... I can't describe it, you have to read it.

Notes

1. Book six - if you get that far - provides a hint: Admittedly the "pen" of George Sand, to borrow a phrase from Brichot, who was so fond of saying that a book was written with a "lively pen," no longer seemed to me, as for so long it had seemed to my mother before she had gradually come to model her literary tastes upon mine, in the least a magic pen.