In The Shadow of Young Girls in Flower

After the shock of the first volume, the second has become part of my routine. It's now automatic, I immediately go to the subject of the adjective that starts the sentence, 5 lines later. And it seems that slowly, the charm wears off.

Around Mrs Swann

Guess who is this Mme Swann, the new wife of the famous Swann that we followed for so long in the first volume? Yes, unfortunately, it's Odette. The narrator orbits around her during this second volume, partly because she fascinates him with her beauty (?) (wealth must have helped her in this, we remember that she was not particularly pretty in the first volume), but mostly because of her daughter, Gilberte, whom we had already met briefly, and whom he loves passionately. Once again, it is a one-way love, which eats away at him, which prevents him from sleeping and writing as he would like to. It lasts for years, during which he fervently hopes to win his beloved's heart with dubious, typical teenage schemes (If I ignore her and refuse to see her for long enough, she will surely realize how much she loves me. If I tell her about other girls, maybe she'll get jealous and realize she loves me.)

As you might expect, it won't work. And like any normal human, he will eventually stop loving her to preserve his sanity.

Country names : the country

For a long time, the narrator has been dreaming of cliffs whipped by waves and topped by thousand-year-old churches. This dream and the desire to soothe his asthmatic lungs finally convince him to go on an extended vacation to Balbec (a fictional town) with his grandmother. This trip will make him forget Gilberte.

He soon notices a group of girls his own age and falls in love with them. Yes, he falls in love of the group. From time to time he tries to concentrate on one of the girls, but another one always manages to distract him. He will eventually fall in love with one of them, and it will be mentioned many times that they will end up together, but for now, it doesn't happen. Instead, she forcefully pushes him away. We see a pattern here.

It was at this part that I got a little stumped. There were long passages on architecture, a subject that doesn't interest me much and so I don't know any vocabulary. And while I identified so much with the dreamy little boy of Combray, I no longer understood the teenager full of hormones who desires many girls at the same time and who can't even distinguish between them well.

Let's just say I can't wait for him to grow up.