Customer Reviews
Where are the rest of the Penguin Deluxe Prousts?:
I’m dying to buy the last three volumes of In Search of Lost Time in the new Penguin/Viking translations, but I can’t find the Deluxe paperbacks with the slighly larger print–not in paperback or in hardback. What’s up?
Volume 4 — not volume 5:
The naming of the British books makes it very confusing as to which volume is which. A previous review said that this is volume 5, but it is in fact volume 4: Sodom and Gomorrah.
a splendid translations of my favorite volume thus far:
This book is misleadingly shown under the series title. It is actually “Sodom and Gomorrah” as translated by John Sturrock, and is volume five of the new “Penguin Proust” translations of “In Search of Lost Time”.
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.
