In Search of Lost Time: Swann's Way - A Graphic Novel

I didn't love this as much as I thought I would, or as much as reading the novel. The flow of Proust's sublime sentences was broken up by the graphic novel format, and I found it difficult to get into the rhythm of his words, distracted by the pictures and needing to figure out which panel came next. In addition, the abridgment lacked the depth of the original story.

Swann's Way is about memory and imagination and the nature of childhood to endow ordinary scenes with special meaning. Reading it is a very personal, mysterious experience. The provided images took away from that, preventing communion with my own mind and my own memories, and from reflecting more deeply on the nature of Proust's ideas.

Five stars for the novel, three for this incarnation.

Read the subtitle before you start telling me what an amazing reader I am. Full disclosure here: It's a graphic novel of Proust's mega-tome. I must say that it fully satisfied my desire to read Proust. I got the tone of it, the way Proust zooms into one moment so that you experience it in all its real-life complexity. Graphic novels, I admit, aren't my favorite genre; too often, I find the text reads banally when combined with cartoonish pictures. That did not happen here, perhaps because the text is too rich to be diluted in a graphic novel.

I recommend it, then. I recommend it for those of us who don't want to spend several years of our lives reading a single albeit highly praised novel. I recommend it for those of us who want to see what all the fuss is about. I can't say if this little graphic novel is a good substitute for the real thing (since I haven't cracked the real thing) but it felt good enough for me.