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.

This graphic novel is simply stunning.

It is not a classic comic book that you might expect. The difference is that the graphic novel tries to mirror what's written in the original novel as compared to just displaying interesting plot that you might expect in comic books like Logicomix or Irmina. The graphics in this book display thought train of the character, his dreams, almost as a poetic movie would have done.

The first ~35 pages were difficult to get through. Nothing interesting really happened, context was laid out but without any connection to later events or the other way around later in the book - except one very important moment - the famous Madeleine moment. I haven't read the original novel, but my guess would be the book copied original in this aspect. However, after this difficult beginning, hold your hats. It'll strike you right in the heart and brain. The book is able to supernaturally grasp and express human emotions in a way I have not seen before. I started relating to most of the scenes through something that happened in my real life, either through my friends' stories, or my own experience.

I must admit that I reluctantly opened the book the second time, after earlier disappointment with the boring start that literally made me take a long break from the book. But once I got through that part, I could not stop reading and read the book in a one go.

The ending is anticlimactic, but not bad per se. It leaves you with your thoughts, with a mental conflict if you are really yearning for more or if you are happy with what has been said (or drawn, for that matter). And it gives you one more thing - desire to read the original novel, the source for all this beauty of emotions that were just poured all over you.

Fantastic reading that reads better with age of the reader. Younger people might not find it that interesting though.