Swann'ların Tarafı (Swann's Way)

I could not finish this book. I started three times, and the farthest I got was around page two hundred.

I am writing about it here anyway, because what it left in me did not require finishing it.

What it is

Kayıp Zamanın İzinde (In Search of Lost Time) is a work in seven volumes. This is the first, and it is divided into three parts.

Combray: the narrator's childhood. A town, a house, waiting for his mother's kiss before going to bed at night.

Swann'ın Bir Aşkı (Swann in Love): a story that takes place before the narrator is born. A rich and elegant man called Swann, and his obsessive love for a woman called Odette.

Yer Adları (Place-Names): the narrator's childhood love for Swann's daughter Gilberte.

The plot is thin, and deliberately so. The subject of the book is not events but how events sit in the mind.

The idea that stopped me

Proust separates two kinds of memory.

Voluntary memory: what comes when you try to remember. Dry, incomplete, edited.

And here is the real point: what you remember is not the event itself, but how you have told it before. By telling and telling, a version forms, and in the end you remember that version. The original is gone.

Involuntary memory: what comes with a smell, a taste, a sound. It brings the event back with all its feeling, and it cannot be produced on purpose.

This is the famous scene: the narrator tastes a cookie dipped in linden tea, and a whole town, a whole childhood comes back. Together with details he had not remembered until then.

What settled in me about my own memory

The things I try hard to remember always come in the same form, as if memorized. The same three sentences, the same order, the same details.

But a song plays and ten years ago opens up exactly as it was. Though I never wanted it, unprepared, with every detail.

You cannot produce the second kind. You will have to wait.

This is what Proust chases for seven volumes, and it is a justified chase. Once I understood it, I think I do not need the rest of the book. Maybe I am wrong.

The jealousy section

Part of the farthest I got was Swann's love, and there I found one more thing.

When Swann falls in love with Odette, he begins to imagine her everywhere she is. With whom, where, doing what.

Proust writes this obsession step by step: a question is asked, the answer is not enough, a new question comes out of the answer, and the chain never ends.

In the end Swann realizes this: he has spent years of his life on a woman he did not even like.

This section can be read like a novel of its own, and I think it is the most accessible part.

The sentences beat me

A single sentence can last half a page. Parentheses, comparisons, side thoughts come into it, then it returns to the main sentence and you have forgotten where it started.

This is not a flaw, it is a method: it puts into the shape of the sentence how thought really flows, cutting itself off and branching.

I tried reading aloud and it really did get better. Long sentences are solved by voice: the places where you breathe show the structure of the sentence.

But I do not have a quiet stretch where I can read aloud every day.

What I accepted

This book does not fit my life right now.

It cannot be read with divided attention and I live with divided attention. This is not a matter of ability but of conditions, and it comes out in the same place as what Woolf describes: not everyone has uninterrupted time.

The day I stopped carrying finishing as a debt I felt relieved, and that relief counts as a kind of gain too.

One day maybe. Not now.

If you want to try

Five pages a day is a realistic goal. Do not aim at finishing.

When you lose the sentence, go back to the start; everyone does it, there is nothing to be ashamed of.

Do not plan the seven volumes. This volume stands on its own, and the "Swann in Love" section is printed separately, so starting from there is also possible.

In Turkish, Roza Hakmen's translation is considered the standard and is much praised.

It is around five hundred pages.