Hello everyone, welcome to my second blog! After reading Proust’s Combray this week, I have a lot of insights that I want to share with you.In this novel, the author mainly recounts a childhood memory in Combray. In the first part, the personal traits …
“I did not understand half the words the lady said, but my fear that there was some question concealed in them which it would have been impolite of me not to answer made me keep on listening to them with close attention, and this made me very tired.” (80). This quote humorously sums up my […]
“Combray” by Proust takes us through the nostalgia trip of our main character. This one was admittedly a harder read for me. I found myself passionately reading on and on with these very descriptive adjectives being thrown at me continuously. There were parts I found to be rather boring and others I found truly captivating. …
Posted in Blogs, Proust | Tagged with France, memory, nostalgia, week 2
My initial response to Marcel Proust’s “Combray” was that it was confusing and full of long sentences that never seemed to end, yet it was also filled with vivid imagery that let my imagination run wild. Specifically, I appreciated the details of the narrator’s reflection of his sleeping process and the thoughts that ran through […]
Posted in Blogs, Proust | Tagged with childhood, memory, relationships
Huh? That was my initial thought when I started reading this section. It seemed like the author was saying some profound things, but in all honesty they flew over my head. I had a hard time following what he was saying, but after re-reading some of the lines it started to make sense (a bit). […]
After finishing “Combray,” my impression is that “I believe he didn’t write a book but rather his life.” I feel my emotions about this chapter are contradictory; I sense I can’t grasp the endpoint, yet I am drawn to this descriptive style. Most novels usually have a central theme as an unspoken agreement. However, this […]
My first thought when reading “Combray” by Marcel Proust was, why are these sentences so long? It wasn’t until I continued to read the novel and watch the video on Proust that I realized these unconventional grammatical rules and sentence structure were simply a part of modernism. The reason for the length of sentences became […]
Posted in Blogs, Proust | Tagged with memory, nostalgia, time
“But, when nothing subsists of an old past, after the death of people, after the destruction of things, along, frailer but more enduring, more immaterial, more persistent, more faithful, smell and taste still remain from a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, upon the ruins of all the rest, bearing without giving away, on […]
Posted in Blogs, Proust | Tagged with childhood, family, memory, time
Hello viewers (in James May’s voice). I did a quick scroll on the blog page and so far almost every post about Proust has been negative. I share similar feelings, so I will try to explain it. The story starts by reminiscing the childhood of the protagonist on a sleepless night. The child is a […]
[Combray] by Marcel Proust is not a page-turner. Every sentence in the book is lengthy and contains long-winded details, and every scene is, in my perspective, descriptive as the protagonist tries to depict everything he feels in the moment. One explicit example is the sentence above. In the sentence, he is trying to describe the […]
