Remembrance of Things Past

Swann's Way

By: Marcel Proust, Scott Moncrieff - translator

Narrated by: John Rowe

Length: 19 hrs and 44 mins

Publisher's summary

Exclusively from Audible

Swann's Way is Marcel Proust's literary masterpiece and the first part of the multivolume audiobook Remembrance of Things Past.

In the opening volume, the narrator travels back in time to recall his childhood and to introduce the listener to Charles Swann, a wealthy friend of the family and celebrity in the Parisian social scene. He again travels back, this time to the youth of Charles Swann in the French town of Combray, to tell the story of the love affair that took place before his own birth. The jealous love that Swann feels for the courtesan Odette, is a foretelling of the narrator's own future relationships.

Proust paints an unforgettable, scathing and at times comic portrait of French society at the close of the 19th century and reveals a profound vision of obsessive love. The remarkable details from his memory are the fundamental triumph of the audiobook; details like his younger self's desperate need for a goodnight kiss from his mother.

In 1922, Virginia Woolf marvelled, 'Oh if I could write like that!'

Many adaptations have been made of Swann's Way including the 1984 English language film, Swann in Love, starring Jeremy Irons, and a graphic novel by French comic artist Stéphane Heuet that was first published in 1998.

Narrator Biography

Whilst training at the Birmingham School of Speech and Drama, John Rowe did his first radio plays for the BBC before spending several years acting in repertory theatre. He then joined the BBC's Radio Drama Company at Broadcasting House and after a three year stint on stage with the Prospect Company at The Old Vic he became a committed radio actor. He is well known for his role as Professor Jim Lloyd in The Archers. He has not only worked extensively in radio but also in television and film, as well as narrating many audiobooks, including Within a Budding Grove by Marcel Proust. His film appearances have included The Heart of Me (2002) and Lagaan: Once Upon a Time in India (2001). He has most recently appeared on onscreen in the Netflix series The Crown (2016) and the BBC TV series Broken (2017).

Public Domain (P)2014 Audible, Inc.

Classic

No education of literature is complete without listening to Proust's Remembrance of Things Past .

A pleasure to immerse yourself in

This may mark me as a true philistine, but I dearly love this audiobook because — and I am NOT being ironic — it has the most magical power to let me drift off to sleep. And after all, “Swann’s Way" is, at least in the beginning, a book about sleep. (The first publisher to whom it had been submitted turned it down, supposedly because, if memory serves, he didn’t want to publish "a book whose hero takes 30 pages to turn over in bed.") John Rowe’s wonderfully cultivated British voice is sonorous and calming, especially at .75 or .9 speed, and since Proust's narrator is basically spinning memories of his sheltered upper-middle-class childhood, there’s nothing in the subject matter to jar you — no action, no anguish, no suspense. And at bedtime, that’s all to the good. A number of audiobooks have the desirable ability to put me to sleep; but this one — along with Bernard Mayes’ rendition of Boswell’s "Life of Johnson” and Barnaby Edwards’ reading of "The Voyage of the Beagle — is the very best.

First Love

Funny, elegant, rich with glittering internal landscapes, and a depth of vocabulary that will delight the logophile and startles with its precise and nuanced word choices. John Rowe reads oh so well, and brings this text alive in way that few can. The Moncrieff translation is superb. I'm a latecomer to Proust, but it is quite something to rediscover the mystery and whimsical side of life in this way in later years. It's a book that should be taken in slowly and with an alert mind so as to not miss any of a myriad of wildflowers along the journey. Don't expect action or cliffhangers--nothing much happens. Here you will find the subtlety of emotions, the world of unspoken thought and subconscious yearnings, all unfurling richly and quietly as a shadow play that frames the vulnerability, humility, melancholy, joy and humor of our 'humanness'.
Making my way now through volume three of the Remembrance of Things past series. Sorry to see that John Rowe's reading stopped after volume 2.

Philosophical masterwork from a bygone era

There isn’t much of a story here, but there are 22 hours of ‘remembrances’ from the point of view of the main character as a boy, and of his neighbor Mssr Swann. It is full of small observations that everyone can relate to, and childish desires and upper class issues that most people can not relate to as adults or as modern people without servants.

The reader is very good, and easily understandable at 1.25x speed. If you are thinking of giving up on this, try speeding it up and hang in a little longer.

Elegant Mastery

Beautifully written, Eminently listenable, it is sheer craft both in style and idea...a great Audible experience

Oh to be read to

I’ve read Swann’s way twice before. But I never before encountered its humor; or how it actually feels to be jealous or desirous. The performance opened up a whole new Proust for me.

The reader is wonderful!

I would listen to any book that John Rowe reads. He s expression, diction, and feeling for the work are spot on!

Proust’s Masterpiece

The beginning of Proust’s masterpiece, Remembrance of Things Past. The book was read by John Rowe, who did a superb job.

Greater writing probably does not exist.

How can I write a review of Proust’s seminal work without sounding like some kind of blabbering idiot? This is one of the most profound books in all of literature. My goal this year was to read 80 books but I could spend an entire year reading, rereading and pondering between the covers of just this one masterpiece. Of this the Publisher’s Summary: “In this first part, Proust paints an unforgettable, scathing, and, at times, comic portrait of French society at the close of the 19th century, and reveals a profound vision of obsessive love.” That’s almost as bad as anything I could write. The book was at times about a profound vision of obsessive love to be sure but it was so much more. About French society at the close of the 19th century? Maybe; I wouldn’t know; I hardly noticed. For me, the book stood out for its words, the use of words, the language, the prose itself. That was the layer I got stuck in and never seemed to have emerged from. The words were often melodious; sentences were fraught with musicality. Though nothing exactly like a poem, the words did flow in a rhythm but more like that of the ocean’s rise and fall, a natural ebb and flow, not like that of the forced meter of a poem.

Within the chapters, one could contemplate or meditate for extended periods of time on singular sentences. And what sentences some of them were. Some were the longest I have ever encountered in any book but they always made sense and always stood perfectly as they were. And no, Sister Mary (grammar school English composition teacher), they were never run-on sentences. The author never takes such license. The description of a meditation only begins to purport Proust’s familiar visions rooted in the here and now. These seemingly endless sentences had the effect of drawing me in to the fathomless depths of the space between two breaths.

Obviously, it was, at least for me, not a book to be taken lightly or read nonchalantly. It was a book that at times required a certain dedication to and enthusiasm for to read. This is not a book for everyone but one that everyone interested in great literature should at least attempt. Had it not been summer and my workload less than strenuous, I might not have appreciated this book as much as I did. For me, I had to pay attention but when I did, it was a trip into my mind that only a few authors have had the ability to take me on.

Having read and now listened to this volume, I found the experiences to be quite different and each with its own merit. With a book in hand, I could more easily reread passages. With an audiobook, it sometimes felt like I could more easily internalize and be transported by both author and narrator. The narrator, in this case John Rowe, was nothing shy of outstanding in his delivery. I am so glad that he is available for the remainder of the series.

In the interest of time and space and because I could never do justice in a review to the writing’s of this master, the following is an excerpt from perhaps the most often quoted part of the book on remembering the taste of a pastry and tea. The rest of the passage can be found here:

http://www.haverford.edu/psych/ddavis/p109g/proust.html

“Many years had elapsed during which nothing of Combray, save what was comprised in the theatre and the drama of my going to bed there, had any existence for me, when one day in winter, on my return home, my mother, seeing that I was cold, offered me some tea, a thing I did not ordinarily take. I declined at first, and then, for no particular reason, changed my mind. She sent for one of those squat, plump little cakes called "petites madeleines," which look as though they had been moulded in the fluted valve of a scallop shell. And soon, mechanically, dispirited after a dreary day with the prospect of a depressing morrow, I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory - this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me it was me. I had ceased now to feel mediocre, contingent, mortal. Whence could it have come to me, this all-powerful joy? I sensed that it was connected with the taste of the tea and the cake, but that it infinitely transcended those savours, could, no, indeed, be of the same nature. Whence did it come? What did it mean? How could I seize and apprehend it?

I drink a second mouthful, in which I find nothing more than in the first, then a third, which gives me rather less than the second. It is time to stop; the potion is losing its magic. It is plain that the truth I am seeking lies not in the cup but in myself. The drink has called it into being, but does not know it, and can only repeat indefinitely, with a progressive diminution of strength, the same message which I cannot interpret, though I hope at least to be able to call it forth again and to find it there presently, intact and at my disposal, for my final enlightenment. I put down the cup and examine my own mind. It alone can discover the truth. But how: What an abyss of uncertainty, whenever the mind feels overtaken by itself; when it, the seeker, is at the same time the dark region through which it must go seeking and where all its equipment will avail it nothing. Seek? More than that: create. It is face to face with something which does not yet exist, to which it alone can give reality and substance, which it alone can bring into the light of day.”

Mesmerizing narrative and performance

I have at least two copies of Remembrance of Things Past in my library. Some day, some day I was to read it. I have listened to this first section of Swann's Way, and now onto the 2nd "half." The author's insight is fascinating. There are moments that are positively electric, yet nothing is "happening." I cannot imagine a better performance.
I find that I have to take breaks and turn to other books after several hours (days) of listening. To think, I might have missed this classic.