The Prisoner

I finished this fourth volume of In Search of Lost Time much faster than I thought I would. Compared to the others, it seemed rather short. But not because I was swept up in my reading.

Summary

The relationship between Marcel and his girlfriend, Albertine, has gone to another level. She is now living with him in the apartment of Marcel's parents, who are away for quite some time.

Since Sodom and Gomorrah, we know, or at least we guess, that Albertine has a certain taste for women. Marcel suspects that she has dissolute morals, as they used to say at the time, and this drives him crazy. His rather fragile "love" is constantly revived by his bouts of jealousy: just as he decides to leave her, a new lie, an oblique glance that is a little too insistent, and the arrival in town of a young woman with a bad reputation make him go back to her. And now that she is at home and he feels more justified in trying to control her, he engages in all sorts of shenanigans to prevent her from indulging her unchaste desires. He has her followed, he makes up misfortunes so that she will come to console him instead of going to such and such an event, he uses his social connections to make sure she doesn't talk to such and such a person, etc. A healthy relationship.

Impressions

I realize that I only liked the narrator for a brief moment. That was when he was a child, in the first volume. After that, he became a hormone-filled teenager, then a pretentious young adult with questionable values, and finally a jealous and possessive adult. He writes really well, that's undeniable (if you consider that the author and the narrator are the same person). But getting attached to the character is important, and right now I'm finding it difficult. Not only did he behave like a dangerous man, but he also blithely commented on Charlus's homosexuality and spoke of women as an exotic species with limited faculties. He can provide a treasure trove of nuance and detail about the texture of an air at a certain time or the light that falls on his street, but when it comes to talking about homosexuals or women, he is far from standing out from the crowd.

I must say that I enjoyed some of the passages that described jealousy. He was able to hit the nail on the head as he does on many subjects. His descriptions of places and the smallest details that go unnoticed by the average person are absolutely beautiful. But in the end, nothing new for readers who started his work from the beginning.

I find it surprising that there is nothing else to tell but the main plot. Maybe, indeed, this tome was shorter. Or weaker.