
Within a Budding Grove
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Narrated by:
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John Rowe
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By:
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Marcel Proust
In the second volume of Proust's great novel, the narrator emerges as an actor in the drama of his own life. Swann has now dwindled into a husband for his former mistress, Odette, and their daughter, Gilberte, becomes the adolescent narrator's playmate and tantalising love object.
We move from Paris to the seaside town of Balbec, from ritualised social performances to midsummer spontaneity and from Gilberte to her successor, Albertine.
In Balbec, the narrator is befriended by the painter Elstir who introduces him both to the craft of painting and to the mysterious 'little band' of girls. An artistic education is thus intricately interwoven with a journey of sexual self-discovery.
This is now the entire audiobook, not in two parts.
©2008 Marcel Proust (P)2014 Audible, Inc.Listeners also enjoyed...




















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So Proust!
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I have not dipped into newest written translations, which are said to be really good. And after I finish this round of Proust (with the Moncrief translation), I'll start again with the contemporay one). But Moncrief is so good, so good I don't know if I'm hearing Proust or Moncrief (or Rowe). But that's the nature of translation.
Whatever the case, Proust is worth a go. He's not right for everyone. I have friends (novelist friends who can't get into it). But I can. At any rate, dive into Proust, via book, Kindle, or audio. If it doesn't stick. Take a year off. Try again. If it still doesn't stick, you have every right to quit. Reading Proust is always about TIME (among a million other things), and maybe the time is not right for you now.
John Rowe is the reader for Proust and Moncrief
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Delightful read that enriches one's life.
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You. need to read Proust
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insomniac's dream
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Fun and colorful
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Better than hard copy
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At one point, I thought things were getting better: at last! the narrator has gone to a brothel! — but Proust managed to make even that potentially interesting development sound shallow and desiccated. Later, near the end of the book, the narrator develops a promising crush on a young woman named Albertine; but alas, she turns out to be either a mean-spirited tease or monumentally dense about the implications of her flirtatious remarks. (She invites him to a secret tryst at night in her hotel room, and then furiously rings the alarm when he tries to kiss her.)
It’s like having to sit through 25 hours of “My Dinner with André.” It’s full of sound and fury, signifying nothing — except that there’s no fury and very little sound.
Proust’s characters — certainly at least the narrator — are cursed with the same kind of morbid self-consciousness that afflicts the characters of Dostoevsky. There’s one crucial difference: in Dostoevsky, the anguish is existential and the consequences are life or death; in Proust, at least as far as the first two volumes are concerned, the anguish is a mild cough and the consequences are a hangnail. He seems not to notice that his characters are mostly buffoons, the narrator being the biggest buffoon of all.
What can you say about a young man who’s old enough to visit prostitutes, even to have a favorite one, and still cries himself to sleep when his grandmother doesn’t invite him to kiss her goodnight? (The same grandmother who exasperates him because.... she wants to get her photograph taken?) I can’t figure his age. Maybe my attention wandered when he mentioned that. At times he seems to be a young adult, but overall he has the emotional maturity of a pre-teen.
As I said in my comments on the first volume, people I know and and whose literary judgement I trust tell me I’m missing something. I accept that. So, Monsieur Proust, it’s not you, it’s me. I will read one more volume, if only to expose myself to yet another narrator (Neville Jason). But then I expect to call a halt to the proceedings. It seems clear at this point that I am not for Proust, and he is not for me.
Not for me
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John Rose is a rapturously good narrator
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John Rowe
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