A Chequer-Board of Nights and Days

Proust continues to demonstrate his mastery of the art of observation in the second volume of his magnum opus. We see that mastery manifest itself in the way Proust writes about the first throes of love with Gilberte, the heartbreak and gradual indifference that he experiences concerning her and then his amorous feelings for Albertine. Proust's ability to describe and analyze in both passionate and dispassionate terms does not cease to amaze and though the work is fiction, it becomes clear quite quickly that Proust is as unsparing and as exact in his analysis of the self and of life as Augustine was in writing his Confessions. Again, it should be emphasized that Proust's greatest and most potent power as a writer is his ability to identify and empathize so effectively with the feelings of the reader; feelings that the reader thought were particular only to himself or herself until Proust was read.

Equally impressive is Proust's ability to focus on society's darker side, both on the macro level and on the micro one. The microanalysis can be found in Proust's discussion of Bloch, who quickly strikes the reader as being thoroughly annoying and insufferable. The macroanalysis comes from Proust's examination of anti-Semitism in France; a phenomenon that will have a greater impact on the story as we read through Proust's opus and concern ourselves with the ramifications of the Dreyfus Affair.

To be sure, reading Proust is a tremendous challenge. The writing is dense and while it is well-planned and plotted, the language resembles stream-of-consciousness thought (necessary, given the themes of involuntary memory that continue to run through the book). But it remains well worth the effort to read Proust; those who find themselves occasionally exhausted by the task of reading through his great work may console themselves with the thought that the satisfaction of reading through it is at least equal to the challenge.