“The Guermantes Way” has been reissued 📘✨ with a foreword by Yuji Murakami for @livredepoche

“The Guermantes Way” has been reissued 📘✨ with a foreword by Yuji Murakami for @livredepoche:

🖋️ “The Guermantes Way (1920–1921), the third volume of “In Search of Lost Time”, is a novel about social advancement 🤵🏻‍♂️🎩. Centred on the name and figure of the Duchess of Guermantes 👸🏼, it traces the gradual and disillusioned integration of a bourgeois hero into the Faubourg Saint-Germain. After describing his physical and symbolic settling into the Guermantes’ Parisian estate ✨✨ and the succession of lost reveries centred on that name 🛌🕯️, the narrator explores the worlds of the servants, the aristocracy, the theatre, the army and the doctors, via conversations with Charlus and a reunion with Albertine ❤️‍🩹. Amidst these episodes steeped in snobbery and vanity, peppered with premonitory signs of Sodom and Gomorrah, comes the tragicomic evocation of the death of the grandmother 👵🏻, followed, right at the very end, by the announcement of Swann’s impending death 👨🏻‍🦰.

The novel opens with a portrait of a maid. The Guermantes are presented from the outset from the perspective of the servants, whose lives are just as ritualised as those of their masters. This vertical symmetry in the social hierarchy runs throughout the novel, from the evening at the Opera with Berma to the matinee at the theatre with Rachel, from the conversation amongst Saint-Loup’s friends to that of the soldiers at Doncières 🐎, the hero’s ambition and that of Morel, the Dreyfus affair among the socialites and that among the servants, the snobbery of the salon-goers and that of the ‘Marquise’ of the Champs-Élysées 🚽, the Duke’s code of politeness and that of Françoise (…) At the same time, a horizontal symmetry 🛌🪞 of a narrative nature governs various scenes, such as the two conversations with Charlus (…) “The Guermantes Way” is therefore a novel “composed, consciously or unconsciously, with great artistic skill and a sense of balance”.”

(This final quotation is taken from an article by Henri Bidou dated 21 November 1920)

What memories do you have of “The Guermantes Way”?

#MarcelProust #LeCôtédeGuermantes #1920 #proustagram #YujiMurakami #ÀlaRechercheduTempsperdu #Proust #NRF #LeLivredePoche