Aharon Appelfeld, Badenheim 1939

Bruno Schulz and Wittgenstein

4.2.2 Marcel and Albertine 1

I have never fully appreciated unrequited love. Whenever I’ve pursued someone and they’ve given me little or negative responses in return, it’s been all too easy to say, “Well, I guess they aren’t for me ...

3.2 Disenchantment

If the first half of the volume was an alternately dreamy and dreary description of the romance of the Guermantes, the second half is an attempt to contextualize it and explain Marcel’s severe disillusionment with ...

3.1.1 The Situation

Maybe it’s reading The Guermantes Way under drastically different circumstances than the first two books, or maybe it’s that by the third volume, you can no longer see clearly back to the beginning of the ...

2.1.3 Mme Swann at Home: Swann and Odette

If Swann’s Way zigzagged between Marcel’s childhood and Swann’s earlier affair, with clearly defined angles, Within a Budding Grove is corkscrew-shaped: each gnarled observation doubles back on itself and intersects with everything else, with no ...

Proust 1.1 – Overture

Marcel thinks back to earlier years lying in bed. This is the proper introduction to the whole endeavor, and Proust spends fifty pages leading up to the famous madeleines segment, in which his childhood memory ...