Combray by Proust

Hello Everyone, welcome back to my blog. This will hopefully be my last late post as I am scrambling to catch up from joining the class a week late. The book of interest for this week is Combray by Marcel Proust. I had not heard of Proust prior to reading this so I had no expectations coming in, either good or bad. Overall I found the book to be a challenging yet rewarding read. There were definitely times where I felt myself wishing for the sentence to end and for the author to move on from seemingly trivial details. On the flip side, I also feel this longwinded style of writing is part of what makes the book unique and it might not have the same charm without it.

The plot of the book revolves around the narrator’s recollection of a time in their childhood spent at their family home in Combray, as the title suggests. One aspect of the first part I found hard to ignore is the narrator’s obsession with their mother’s kiss, and the great lengths they would go to obtain it. At times I found this obsession quite comical, like when they described walking up the stairs away from their mother as “climbing in opposition to my heart’s desire”, or when they compared preparing their bed clothes that same night to “[digging] my own grave”. These analogies seem a bit dramatic given the situation but they also sort of paint a bleak picture of the narrators state of mind at this moment in their life. It seems like this moment of their day was one of the only things they had to look forward to as a child.

Another part of the book I found fascinating is the idea that who you are as a person is the result of other people’s perceptions rather than any measurable attributes that can be said to define you. The narrator uses Swann as an example of this, and suggests that Swann was sort of a construct of his family’s incomplete notions. They go on to say that the Swann they knew as a child was more similar to the other people they knew at that time than the Swann they knew later in life, perhaps due to everyone around them at the time also being subject to their family’s perception. When I look back at people in my own life I get a similar feeling. I think time sort of has this effect, and can cause people and experiences to blend together.

The madeleine dipped in tea is sort of an iconic part of this book, so my question for the discussion is: Are there any foods from your childhood that might evoke similarly vivid memories?