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Publisher: Naxos Audiobooks
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Released: 2000-09-05
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Customer Reviews:
Note: this review is of Heuet’s adaptation, not the original book 
Stephane Heuet, Remembrance of Things Past: Within a Budding Grove, vol. I (ComicsLit, 2000)
Heuet continues his ambitious adaptation of Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past with the first part of Within a Budding Grove. Our narrator is growing up, and the focus of this volume is a trip to the seaside, meeting some people, getting in touch with old friends, always silently reflecting on both his memories of the past (of course) and the social consciousness of the world around him. If you liked the first one, you’ll like this one as well. ***
The Holy Grail 
Very well….I’m finally, after years of putting it off, writing a review of a work of Art that can’t be reviewed in any meaningful sense of the term, a work of Art that approaches the sacred. As another reviewer puts it, if you think you have read literature with “depths” before, this opus will make ANYTHING you’ve ever read seem, in comparison, like one of those vapid books one picks up at airports during layovers. It is a work by which other novels, poems, paintings are to be judged rather than the other way around. In fact, after reading Proust, one can immediately tell if other “great writers” have read him almost from the start. Recent Booker Prize winning John Banville’s The Sea is a good example of this.
The first time I read this work, about ten years ago, it was the ONLY thing I did, so enraptured was I. For a month, all I did was lie on my bed or, alternately, on the sofa downstairs and read, putting a dash mark at the end of one of the two-page paragraphs when I had to get up to eat or to check the mail or to feed my dog or to answer the phone or to get some shuteye, and then dive back in as soon as possible. - I don’t use the term “dive” lightly - That’s the only metaphor that comes close to expressing what it’s like to read this book. You dive in and plunge deeper and deeper than you thought any Art could ever take you and, if you make it to the end, arise out of the deep cadences of philosophical reverie that constitute Proust’s spellbinding meditations on love and time to behold a world rich and strange. - Proust truly does change your life. One never really recovers from reading him.
A few comments on what some of the other (serious) reviewers have said: 1) A La Recherche du Temps Perdu is not untranslatable and I don’t know why exactly the English translation wasn’t In Search of Lost Time instead of Remembrance of Things Past, taken, of course from the Shakespearian sonnet. But there it is. 2) I am in complete agreement with the reviewer who avers that unless you have been in love and suffered, which critic Harold Bloom remarks, commenting on Proust, means, eventually, everyone who has ever been in love, you will miss Proust’s deepest apercus and regard them (as one reviewer does) as “silly.”
I’m not sure what else I can say. I’ve probably go on too much already. If you are a true lover of Art in its highest sense, please pick up this Holy Grail of literature, even if you are intimidated, as many reviewers admit to being at first. For, as Proust says:
“Thus, it is in states of mind destined not to last that we make the irrevocable decisions of our lives.”
Reading Proust is one of these decisions you won’t regret
A Worthy Investment
Yes, it is long. Yes, the sentences are complex. Nonetheless, this novel is a worthy investment of one’s efforts, because it isolates events that are so innately human that anyone who reads this novel will relate to it. Beyond just reading it because one feels obligated to do so as bibliophile, enjoy the greatest achievement of 20th-century France because it is witty, insightful, daring, and occasionally laugh-out-loud funny.
I recommend reading this novel quickly, rather than being bogged down by details that result in confusion or distraction. I read the novel in 15 weeks in a class at UC Berkeley, and have concluded that it must be read twice–once, to understand the plot and big ideas, and a second time to linger over the concepts that piqued one’s interest the most. However, even if only reading it once, it is worth an investment of one’s time and emotion.
my favorite book
so i was a berkeley english major who needed a class….i just happend to wander into a course on Proust.
it is my favorite book.
it is not light reading, it is for those who want to expericence one of the great novels in the cannon.
I ended up reading the first three volumes.
Swans way left me with satisfation. It is a senory trip in which insecurities and obession exsist without judment. It deals with much of the human psyche in all its forms.
As a lower income Latino male i could still find the univerals truths that bond me to other works that are outside of my personal experience.
It is a work that exsist outside of time, in constant senory experience.
Read it… then reread it.
Learning to swim– my first Proust reading experience
Some time ago, I received the Vintage three-volume box set version of Remembrance as a gift. I had rashly mentioned to a friend that I wanted to read Proust and he took me at my word– the heavy set arriving by mail and scaring me half to death. It took me a long time to get around to reading it, but I finally summoned up my courage and took down the first volume.
I have many thoughts on the books, and the experience of reading them was not always easy. I will summarize, however, by saying that I believe that I was amply rewarded for making the time and space free to tackle this piece.
It took me quite a while to let myself get into the prose. Although I found it immediately beautiful, haunting even, I struggled over the long complex sentences and the unusual structure. The only advice that I can give to the potential first-time reader is to stop trying to catch everything and let yourself swim along. Eventually if you stop fighting the structure, it really starts to work and you are drawn along with it to the point where you no longer experience it as difficult.
Where is the reward for the reader? There is a passage in the book where Proust is discussing how time flows in any given life. He argues that in order to capture time passing, the novelist generally is given to “wildly accelerating the beat of the pendulum, to transport the reader in a couple of minutes over ten, or twenty, or even thirty years.” What I found the most amazing on my first reading of Swann’s Way and Within a Budding Grove was that remarkable sense of time in life that Proust is able to portray. He uses more than the wild leaps and jumps that he attributes to his generic novelist. He condenses time, extends it, shortens it and rearranges it. The array of memories along this life is beautiful, and the more beautiful for being so clearly anchored in a particular place in the life of the characters. I am not sure where he is going with all these people– I will need to read the other books to find out. Still, I was actually content with these two books as a separate reading experience for this element of time passing alone.
I think that on balance if I had bought these books for myself, I would have chosen the Lydia Davis translation. This is based on conversations with friends who were reading the Davis translation at the same time that I was reading this edition. It sounds as though it is fresher, and more readable. However, I found this edition much more accessible than I had feared. Either the Montcrief edition has much less gingerbread prose than generally held, or Kilmarten really did a remarkable job of smoothing it out. I needed to arm myself with a dictionary while reading, since the two of them used some very obscure and/or archaic vocabulary. Although this was occasionally annoying, there were also times when I felt as though less specificity would have hurt the images that were being described.
Recommended, but not lightly.
admin | 
10 31st, 2003| 
