À la Recherche du temps perdu, book 2/7

In 1919, Marcel Proust received the Prix Goncourt for À l'ombre des jeunes filles fleurs, which crowned his literary ambition and journey. In the second volume of his masterly work In Search of Lost Time, the adolescent narrator discovers his first disperienced and chaotic love impulses with the young Albertine, whom he first saw on the beach at Balbec. It is also a novel about art with the meeting of the painter Elstir and the deeper discovery of the world of Charles Swann, his daughter Gilberte and his wife Odette, a truly elusive figure who obsesses the narrator. He grows up and already perceives, through his youthful years and the experience of his first loves, the irreducible passage of time. The memory of his teenage years between Paris and a fantasized Normandy, accentuates his vocation of writer, thwarted and difficult. But already the essence of what makes Marcel Proust one of the greatest authors of the 20th century is there: the intuition that lost time can only be made up for by the power of art and literature.

We read this book in the fall of 2020.