Title:: [[The Guermantes Way]] Authors:: [[Marcel Proust]] Tags:: #fiction Read:: [[2025-02-13]] Instagram :: https://www.instagram.com/p/DGCJrnnO5ww/ ## Editions - Edition:: [[Penguin Classics]], 2003, translated by Mark Treharne, General Editor Christopher Prendergast - Original Copyright:: 1920-21 - Pages:: 597 ## Purchase * Bookshop.org:: https://bookshop.org/a/94437/9780143039228 ## Annotations “Dinner-parties bore us because our imagination is absent, and reading interests us because it is keeping us company.” Proust’s observation, nearly 600 pages in to The Guermantes Way, made me actually laugh out loud.  Slyly breaking the fourth wall after so many pages detailing the various high society salons and dinner parties of early 20th Century Paris, most of which were boring by Proust’s own account, typifies what makes reading about them so comforting. Proust is an anthropologist with an eye for the ridiculous, and that really shows up in this volume.  It’s been a while since I finished the second volume. Part of the reason I think is that I internalized the idea that Guermantes would be a slog. I was wrong. It’s mostly not!  When everything seems to be unraveling around here, there is indeed comfort in reading about the company Proust keeps.