Within a Budding Grove (In Search of Lost Time, #2)
Author: Marcel Proust
Rating: â 5/5
Date Read: 2016/01/20
Pages: 749
âOn the whole I had derived very little benefit from Balbec, but this only strengthened my desire to return there.â
Proust sums up the book better than I can: not much happens during Within a Budding Grove, and I canât wait to see what doesnât happen next. Itâs difficult to talk about Proust, partly because thereâs not much of a plot to In Search of Lost Time (at least, in the traditional sense), partly because Proust is much more eloquent than I am. Initially, I wanted to describe what happened in the book for this review, but then I read this:
âWe do not receive wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can make for us, which no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world.â
This journey through the wilderness is difficult at times, but worth the struggle. That said, I would not recommend Proust to everyone; indeed, most people should probably stick to more exoteric literature. Iâve made the following Venn diagram to elucidate this point:
In other words, this book isnât for philistines. If thatâs you, Iâm sure thereâs a Dan Brown novel you havenât read yet. Or, you can continue with the charade that Jane Austen is your favorite author, and the only reason why you havenât actually read any of her books is that you totally donât have much time, but youâve seen the mini-series and Mr. Darcy is, like, literally amazing. I wonât tell.
However, those of us who are interested in understanding the human condition, who want to swim in a sea of words while simultaneously feeling elated by Proustâs prose style and worthless because they canât write like that, will get quite a lot out of Proust. Another elucidating Venn diagram:
âAlright,â you may say. âI understand your desire to be clever on the internet, and I see that youâre speaking about the Search in general, but, with all due respect, you havenât addressed Within a Budding Grove specifically.â
Fair enough. This second volume of In Search of Lost Time mostly finds our young narrator in the (fictional) seaside resort community of Balbec. He goes there for the air, on doctorâs orders, which I find quite unfair because Iâve never once been prescribed months of leisure time for any of my maladies. Here is some sound medical advice that Iâm thinking about printing out and sticking in my purse, to use next time I get hassled about drinking straight from a bottle of wine whilst travelling on BART:
âTo prevent the suffocating fits which the journey might bring on, the doctor had advised me to take a stiff dose of beer or brandy at the moment of departure, so as to begin the journey in a state of what he called âeuphoria,â in which the nervous system is for a time less vulnerable.â
From here, Proust meditates on the nature of love, which is the major theme that permeates this volume of the Search. The narrator is unsure how to deal with his waning infatuation with Gilberte, and doesnât quite understand how to parse his obsession with the almost amorphous band of young women he meets on the beach in Balbec. Hereâs a passage:
âNo doubt very few people understand the purely subjective nature of the phenomenon that we call love, or how it creates, so to speak, a supplementary person, distinct from the person whom the world knows by the same name, a person of whose constituent elements are derived from ourselves.â
Fundamentally, though, this is a book about adolescence, and the awkwardness involved with becoming a person, and figuring out what makes your heart sing, and realizing that the adults around you arenât as infallible as they appear:
âBut the characteristic feature of the ridiculous age I was going through â awkward indeed but by no means infertile â is that we do not consult our intelligence and that the most trivial attributes of other people seem to us to form an inseparable part of their personality. In a world thronged with monsters and gods, we know little peace of mind. There is hardly a single action we perform in that phase which we would not give anything, in later life, to be able to annul. Whereas what we ought to regret is that we no longer possess the spontaneity which made us perform them. In later life we look at things in a more practical way, in full conformity with the rest of society, but adolescence is the only period in which we learn anything.â
Which is remarkable, not only because I think itâs interesting to explore adolescence from the point of view of someone nearer to the end of their life than the beginning, but also because I now have intellectual ammunition against those who claim that young adult literature âis like totally interesting to grownups because, like, literally, youth is such an awesome and amazing time, and like, thatâs what makes YA interesting and awesome and amazing, like, oh-em-gee all the feels.â I hope you brought your bulletproof jackets, plebs, because if you ever make that claim again youâre going to get a copy of âWithin a Budding Groveâ launched straight into your chest.