Title:: [[Sodom and Gomorrah]] Authors:: [[Marcel Proust]] Tags:: #fiction Read:: [[2025-11-28]] Instagram :: https://www.instagram.com/p/DRniT59jTGa/ ## Editions - Edition:: [[Penguin Books]], 2005 - Original Copyright:: 1921-22 - Pages:: 576 ## Purchase * Bookshop.org:: https://bookshop.org/a/94437/9780143039310 ## Cover Photo `` ## Annotations Back on the Proust train. Sodom and Gomorrah feels like watching two societies run on parallel tracks: one brightly lit and proper, the other mostly hidden unless you know where to look. The first three volumes spend a lot of time in the first - soirées, manners, and the formal choreography of society. In S&G he lifts the curtain to reveal what’s humming underneath: sexual desires and proclivities, secrets, and all the stuff people pretend not to see. Hard not to think about the world today, where the news is filled with names and rumors in batches of emails. Another reminder that the public and private faces rarely match up. Proust isn’t judging, though he is jealous, he’s mostly just observing. The similes remain my favorite part of reading Proust. No one compares being in love to the entire geological history of the earth quite like him, smh. Finally, the automobiles. I don’t remember such clear reminders of modernity in the previous volumes, but here they’re buzzing around Balbec, the Belle Époque in the rear window (did they have rear windows then?). Useful reminder that this wasn’t as long ago as it often seems. Translated by John Sturrock.