À la Recherche du temps perdu, book 5/7

The narrator continues his exploration of Parisian social circles in search of beauty, aware that he is wasting his time and torn by his vocation as an artist in the making –but whose work is still awaited. He witnesses the rise of Madame Verdurin's salon and her petit clan, he still rubs shoulders with the great personalities who fascinate him, such as le baron de Charlus, whom he observes with the same curiosity and acuity, and whose sick obsession with the young musician Morel he recounts. But the narrator, more absent and spectatorial in the previous volumes, returns to the center of the novel with, as the crux of the plot, his growing and exponential love for Albertine, the little bourgeois orphan with the air of a tomboy. The prisoner is indeed her, since the narrator gradually locks her up in the jail of his jealousy, tortured by this woman who seems to escape him at every moment. But he, too, it a prisoner of his own obsession. The volume revives the old leitmotivs of La Recherche: love and jealousy, the fluidity of the world, the beauty of things and the passing of time; it also gives us the opportunity to read some famous pages, beautiful or terrible, which reflect his search for the depths of the human soul.

We read this book in the winter and spring 2022.