Whatever you want to call this volume of Remembrance of Things Past, whether it be "The Prisoner" or "The Captive", it is also for obvious reasons called "The Albertine Novel." In the beginning of "The Captive/Prisoner" Albertine is the narrator's mistress. As soon as she wants to visit friends he (as narrator finally named Marcel at times) bribes Albertine with furs and jewels to make her stay in his family's Paris apartment. There he keeps a close eye on her. Despite this possessive nature, he (Marcel) soon grows tired of Albertine but cannot completely let her go, hence the title of prisoner or captive. He becomes progressively more jealous, possessive, obsessive to the point of borderline psychotic worrying and wondering about who Albertine is with, male or female. Her confession of a friendship with lesbians forces Marcel to stoop to spying to see if she has relationships with other women. As usual, Proust has his finger squarely on the pulse of human nature. Albertine is the epitome of freedom while Marcel embodies jealousy and rage. ( )

My detailed reviews of the individual works are found at:

The Captive
The Fugitive, or The Sweet Cheat Gone ( )

I'm almost done with this book. All I have left is the last volume. It's long. Makes some long series look easy. On thing I picked up more than the other volumes is he talks a lot about anxiety. I think he mentions it 20 times. Proust actually had it himself and I think he's one of the few writers to write about it well that doesn't come off as a crazy person. ( )

Video for The Captive: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lnopID4eXq8
Video for The Fugitive: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKfiHqMlMO0 ( )

[review of The Fugitive.]

I think every reader of The Fugitive has the same feeling at the end: just one more book to go! It should be an exhilarating ride.

The first half of The Fugitive is about the aftermath of Albertine’s having finally left the narrator (sometimes called Marcel). He constantly thinks about her, spies on her, offers money to her relatives for her return (without calling the transaction a purchase). He still obsesses over her suspected attraction to women, and investigates whether she had such relationships. There is also an incident that is casually slipped in, where Marcel gets hauled into the police station on suspicion of pedophilia (!). He never says explicitly the age of the girl in question, or in what his behavior (“I held her on my knee” in this Enright translation) consisted, although implying that it was quite innocent.

Then a big thing happens that means Marcel won’t get her back. This is my major complaint about this book. I mean, I know that plotting is not Proust’s strong point, but couldn’t you (Proust) have come up with something better? Maybe Albertine dates around, maybe she quickly gets engaged to someone else, maybe she openly takes up with a woman as an “out” lesbian? These all would have been more interesting to see her do, and to see Marcel react to.

Instead, the actual plot device that Proust chooses seemed very artificial, a quick out, a sort of deus ex machina, where the author’s heavy hand is overly visible.

Later in the book, we finally get to see Marcel visit Venice. With his mother - a trip there with Albertine would have been a great joy to read about. I really loved this section, and would have enjoyed another 100 pages of Venice (instead of the hundreds of pages wasted at various dinner parties).

Finally, there is the marriage of Gilberte and Saint-Loup. Doesn’t this unite the Two Ways: Swann and Guermantes? If so, I would have thought to encounter it in the final volume. In any event, the union doesn’t seem so happy, as more revelations about Saint-Loup occur, disturbing revelations that are hurtful to Marcel (and Gilberte).

I’ll close with a beautiful passage, a long single sentence, that occurs near the end:

“It is the wisdom inspired by the Muse whom it is best to ignore for as long as possible if we wish to retain some freshness of impressions, some creative power, but whom even those who have ignored her meet in the evening of their lives in the nave of an old country church, at a point when suddenly they feel less susceptible to the eternal beauty expressed in the carvings on the altar than to the thought of the vicissitudes of fortune which those carvings have undergone, passing into a famous private collection or a chapel, from there to a museum, then returning at length to the church, or to the feeling that as they walk around it they may be treading upon a flagstone almost endowed with thought, which is made of the ashes of Arnauld or Pascal, or simply to deciphering (forming perhaps a mental picture of a fresh-faced country girl) on the brass plate of the wooden prie-dieu the names of the daughters of the squire or the notable - the Muse who has gathered up everything that the more exalted Muses of philosophy and art have rejected, everything that is not founded upon truth, everything that is merely contingent, but that reveals other laws as well: the Muse of History.” (p.918-9) ( )