Product Description

First published in 1919, Within a Budding Grove was awarded the Prix Goncourt, bringing the author immediate fame. In this second volume of In Search of Lost Time, the narrator turns from the childhood reminiscences of Swann’s Way to memories of his adolescence. Having gradually become indifferent to Swann’s daughter Gilberte, the narrator visits the seaside resort of Balbec with his grandmother and meets a new object of attention—Albertine, “a girl with brilliant, laughing eyes and plump, matt cheeks.”

For this authoritative English-language edition, D. J. Enright has revised the late Terence Kilmartin’s acclaimed reworking of C. K. Scott Moncrieff’s translation to take into account the new definitive French editions of Á la recherché du temps perdu (the final volume of these new editions was published by the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade in 1989).

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #182419 in Books
• Published on: 1998-11-03
• Released on: 1998-11-03
• Original language: French
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 784 pages

Review
?It is marvelously about life.? ?Terence Kilmartin -- Review

Review
“It is marvelously about life.” —Terence Kilmartin

Language Notes
Text: English, French (translation)

Customer Reviews

Open up the floodgates, freedom reigns supreme
Volume 2 of Marcel Proust's 4000+ page masterpiece, "In Search of Lost Time", is, if it's possible, an even greater book than the first volume. I read Volume 1, "Swann's Way", with the kind of astonishment and joy generally reserved for Tolstoy and Maugham, constantly amazed at Proust's (via Moncrieff, Kilmartin, & Enright) ability to deepen sensation and memory to almost religious proportions, and when I finished I thought, "There's no way he can keep this level of beauty up for another 5 volumes." Judging from Volume 2, I was dead wrong.

Proust published "Swann's Way" in 1913, and waited 6 years to publish Volume 2, "Within a Budding Grove"; I presume that in the interim he reorganized his ideas, deciding to expand his novel and explore his themes in greater detail. This volume is much more leisurely and intricately paced than the first, as Proust masterfully tells us of the end of his relationship with Gilberte, his relocation to Balbec, and the beginning of his relationship with Albertine. The slow dying of love, the vaguely confusing experience of a new dwelling as it gradually becomes a home, watching beautiful young girls (the "budding grove" of the title) enjoying their beauty and youth as they walk down a city street...these things and more are plumbed and ruminated upon, with Proust's typically intricate and gorgeous language.

These books, if the first two are any guide, are like nothing ever attempted in the history of literature. Rather than dealing with WHAT happened, Proust settles himself in for the long haul to try and understand WHY it happened; to quote Christopher Hitchens, Proust "exposes and clarifies the springs of human motivation...with a transparency unexampled except in Shakespeare or George Eliot." But I don't think Bill nor George ever dug this deep; Marcel Proust is absolutely one of a kind, and he's not easy to read in this world of flash-images and expressways. He takes his time. Though he was dying with every labored breath (he didn't live to see the entire novel published), Proust was in no hurry to finish. His thoughts, like his sentences, have multiple branches. Follow them and you'll cherish the experience like it was your own.

Moving on to Volume 3.....

The pleasure of reading Proust (Volume II).
"Alas!" Proust writes in the second volume of his attempts to recapture his lost childhood and long-forgotten feelings, "in the freshest flower it is possible to discern those just perceptible signs which the instructed mind already betray what will, by the dessication or fructification of the flesh that is today in bloom, be the ultimate form, immutable and already predestined, of the autumnal seed" (p. 643).

Having just finished reading WITHIN A BUDDING GROVE for the fourth time, it remains (with SWANN'S WAY) at the top of my list of favorite novels. Influenced by John Ruskin, Henri Bergson, Wagner and the fiction of Anatole France, in his "universality and deep awareness of human nature," Proust (1871-1922) is considered "as primordial as Tolstoy," and "as wise as Shakespeare" (Harold Bloom, GENIUS, p. 218).

I most recently returned to Proust's BUDDING GROVE through the Modern Library's 2003 edition of the Montcrieff/Kilmartin translation of Proust's IN SEARCH OF LOST TIME, Volumes I through VI. Through a continued series of what Walter Pater has called "privileged moments," or what James Joyce might call "epiphanies," the narrative of WITHIN A BUDDING GROVE gracefully transitions away from the childhood recollections of SWANN'S WAY, to the narrator's exquisite memories of his adolescence spent with his grandmother in the seaside setting of Balbec. We find that Charles Swann's turbulent affair with the "illiterate courtesan" (p. 124), Odette de Crecy, has resulted in marriage; and although the narrator's "enchantment" with Swann's daughter, Gilberte, gradually fades, he soon encounters unrequited love once again upon meeting the "charming, pretty, intelligent" and "quite witty" (p. 116) Albertine Simonet. In Volume II, Proust further develops his notion that human love is synonymous with suffering, failure, exhaustion, ruin, and despair. To love and believe in a woman completely becomes the "cause of the greatest suffering" (p. 713). "There can be no peace of mind in love," Proust's narrator reflects, "since what one has obtained is never anything but a new starting-point for future desires" (p. 213). "In reality," he adds, "there is in love a permanent strain of suffering which happiness neutralises, makes potential only, postpones, but which may at any moment become, what it would long since have been had we not obtained what we wanted, excrutiating" (p. 214). WITHIN A BUDDING GROVE, much like SWANN'S WAY, is by no means a feel-good novel. Proust reveals that while love may allow us to touch the sublime, it also teaches us that there are no limits to human suffering.

In Volume II of Proust's IN SEARCH OF LOST TIME, Proust introduces us to all the major characters of his subsequent volumes. Serious readers will experience uncommon pleasure in reading Proust. SWANN'S WAY and WITHIN A BUDDING GROVE are perfect examples of why it's worth one's time to read "a good book." In fact, a life without experiencing the rich pleasures of reading Proust would be real poverty.

G. Merritt

Disarrangement of the Senses
We were introduced to the narrator of Proust's IN SEARCH OF LOST TIME in Volume 1, SWANN'S WAY: We saw a few scenes from his childhood in Combray and the beginnings of his love for Gilberte, the daughter of his family friend Swann, whose disastrous love affair (and subsequent marriage) with a courtesan named Odette de Crecy takes up the majority of the volume.

In WITHIN A BUDDING GROVE, the narrator makes his first tentative attempts at love. His plan to ingratiate himself with Gilberte by becoming friends with her parents backfires badly when Gilberte begins to distance himself from him. He agrees then to spend a season with his grandmother in a Norman oceanside resort named Balbec. There, in the most memorable scene in the novel, he makes the acquaintance of a "little band" of eight girls whose poise and sang-froid disarranges his senses. He falls in love, with first, then another. As the novel ends, we see him select one of them, Albertine, for future conquest.

This is my second time through the budding grove of Proust's great multi-part novel with its crescendo of (unfulfilled) sensuality. Such was the impact of the Balbec scenes that I thought that the narrator's pursuit of the band of girls took up most of the novel. In fact, it does not appear until well into the last part and takes up less than 200 pages. It is simply that Proust imprinted that scene so strongly in my mind that, over the years, I mistook a part for the whole.

WITHIN A BUDDING GROVE introduces some memorable characters that will come back in future volumes: In addition to Albertine, there are Robert de Saint-Loup, the painter Elstir, the Marquise de Villeparisis, and the Baron de Charlus. In the later volumes, we will see how Marcel (for that is the narrator's name) will fare with Albertine, and how the world that he saw as a shimmering fairy castle will shatter with the working out of his destiny, that of his friends, and that of the French in the years before the Great War.

One of the great chess grandmasters commented on the opening setup position -- before any moves had been made -- by saying "All the mistakes are there, waiting to be made."