Proust completely captures a hundred little details that paint the picture, that made me giggle and warmed my heart but that are usually glossed over in real life because they are a matter of course, common place, just how things are done.
The first chapter ends with the moment. On a gray day as an adult the narrator dunks a madeleine into a cup of lime blossom tea and then has to fight his memory to recapture something half forgotten and buried. He repeats the incident until he makes the dry and dusty memories bubble up into view.
These first 50 pages took me just within chapter two where Proust gives a great description of the church in Combray and how it represented and spoke for the town in the surrounding countryside. He then describes the narrator's Great-Aunt Leonie's rooms and this takes a little more than 50 lines. The description evokes the subtle smells and the atmosphere that just belongs to some places and it attributes it the to protozoa and the other things that hang in the air.
I am suitably impressed, but I am a little bit of a fangirl here. So far, I'd say that Proust has done a good job of capturing the, "You just had to be there," of the narrator's childhood. I'm looking forward to next week's reading!
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