‘Combray’ – Marcel Proust

This weeks’ text is titled ‘Combray’, the first part of the book titled ‘Swann’s Way’ by French author Marcel Proust. The text focuses on both the narrator of the story, and a M.Swann. In the first pages of the text, the narrator appears to be a young boy when first meeting and perceiving M.Swann. To be completely honest, I found it quite difficult to fully grasp a lot of the meanings coming out of each long bout of text. The style of writing is extremely eloquent and the language quite beautiful. A favourite line of mine from the text is when the narrator is describing the lovely deposition of his grandmother and says that her gaze was “a sort of kiss from her eyes”, on page twelve of the text, and I found myself enjoying the wording and flow of the text as I read. 

On the other hand, as much as I enjoyed the beauty of the writing style, I often found myself confused and getting distracted by the descriptive elements of the text, largely due to the fact that the major message or plot point wasn’t overwhelmingly clear. This made it much more difficult for me to understand, which I would say definitely hindered my comprehension and enjoyment of the text.

Nonetheless, there were a few aspects of the text which I found to be quite interesting. For instance, in the early pages of the text, I had some questions concerning the nature of the narrator’s life. At first, I wondered if perhaps he was perhaps in poor health, whether that be mental or physical, as the narrator marks time in his life based on the bed and bedroom he had at that time, which to me, seems like the behaviour of something experiencing either a physical or mental illness. Adding to my idea of the narrator of the text being sickly or weak was the suggestion made by his grandmother, and then further echoed by his father, who finds the narrator’s emotional attachment to his mother as a sign of weakness. The connotation of what is said appears to me to say that the narrator is more emotional and physically smaller than his family would prefer or expect at this time. However, these ideas  don’t seem to actually play too much of a role in the rest of the story, but are rather something that stuck out to me, perhaps simply because I was struggling to grasp the meaning and main plot of the story, and was therefore looking at details that I could find to see if I could piece together a deeper understanding.

Overall, I wasn’t a huge fan of this book, but I did quite enjoy the language that was used by Proust, as I previously mentioned. I am typically a fan of the use of this type of descriptive language but more so within a text with a relatively simple plot line. This is largely due to the fact that, as I mentioned previously, I can sometimes get caught up in specific language and small details that don’t actually mean too much to the story, and can sometimes hinder or distract my understanding of the text as a whole. However, I am definitely looking forward to discussing this book as I feel like there is definitely something I’m missing that others have picked up!