In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)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.....

Click Here to see more reviews about: In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower

Readers and reviewers in the United Kingdom have hailed the new translations of Proust as a major literary event. Soon to appear in the United States, Swann's Way, along with the second volume of In Search of Lost Time, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, will introduce a new century of American readers to the literary riches of Proust. These superb editions—the first completely new translation of Proust's novel since the 1920s—bring us a more comic and lucid Proust than English readers have previously been able to enjoy.In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower is a spectacular dissection of male and female adolescence, charged with the narrator's memories of Paris and the Normandy seaside. In it, Proust introduces some of his greatest comic inventions. As a meditation on different forms of love, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower has no equal.

Click here for more information about In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower