Dark Times

Page: TR 212
Pages read since last post: 212
Days reading Proust: 140 (16, 64, 29, 16, 7, 4, 4*)
Books read since last post: 0

Completely different feel to this volume. We catch up with Marcel some years later, with him having spent time convalescing between the end of Fug and the start of this one. Thankfully he has spared us the details of the interim period. Europe has been plunged into war and for the increasingly irrelevant aristocracy these are dark times, with allegiances not always so easy to determine. Gilberte and Saint-Loup are less-than-happily married now, and the narrator's friend is not all he once was battling with personal troubles and an awareness of his own mortality. When he meets with an untimely end on the Front, Marcel treats us to a heartwarming tribute to the friend he had grown apart from in recent times. "This man who throughout his life, even when sitting down, even when walking across a drawing-room, had seemed to be restraining an impulse to charge, while with a smile he dissembled the indomitable will which dwelt within his triangular head, at last had charged".

As the wartime horrors dissolve into yet another period of convalescence, we have a break of a few years before Marcel returns to Paris. Cue further deteriorations in many of the main characters: the narrator himself of course, the Verdurins, Charlus in particular and even Francois is less than her usual sturdy self now. Marcel, in seriously poor health, is currently agonising about his perceived literary failings. As the lines between fiction and autobiography become increasingly blurred perhaps there is still time left for one last great revelation. .