This is the third volume of In Search of Lost Time, in which our hero (I’ll call him Marcel even though that’s probably not his name) enters the world of high society, basically by stalking Mme de Guermantes until he falls in with her social set and gets invited to her salons. In the meantime, a lot happens (relatively speaking; this is not The Three Musketeers). He hangs out with his friend Robert de Saint-Loup, who inexplicably thinks very highly of him. At one point Saint-Loup and friends have a long discussion of military strategy – I thought of that late chapter of War & Peace where the novel suddenly turned into a field marshal’s manual.
The centrepiece of the book (although it is towards the end) is a dinner chez Guermantes, which lasts several hours and took me almost as long to read, as the narrative extended over more than 100 pages. So much gossip about Baron This and Princess That. They are all glitteringly rich or fabulous or both, but also totally ensnared in their narrow society rules. First world problems!
Marcel holds his own in this company, taking all this in and making his own contributions, including the odd faux pas which he gets away with due to his youth and the fact that a lot of people don’t really know who he is. As always, his observations on everyone else’s thoughts and actions are insightful and sometimes low-key hilarious.
After all this, a bit of a one-two punch at the end. The first is his meeting with the proud and high-handed M. de Charlus, in which Charlus is completely unhinged, ranting and abusive, to the point where Marcel stomps on his hat in fury. I always found Charlus a bit odd. Incredibly, they part on good terms so we probably have more craziness to look forward to in the next volume or two.
The second punch is Death. The novel was already punctuated halfway with the illness and death of Marcel’s beloved grandmother. But at the end we discover, and this made me sad, that Charles Swann is now gravely ill. Swann is a major character – the only character in the whole novel whose name appears in one of the volume titles – so if he goes now before we’re halfway through it’ll be like Janet Leigh in Psycho. Almost.
Also at the end, Marcel receives a momentous moral revelation, but says it is so important he will delay his account of it “for a moment”. In the context of In Search of Lost Time, this “moment” could be 200 pages. So that counts as a cliffhanger I guess – I look forward to opening volume 4 (Sodom and Gomorrah) sometime soon.