Recommendations from our site
“It continues the flavour of the end of the first volume. For the most part, it is light and bright. I think of the whole novel as having a ski jump shape over the 3,000 pages. You start off reasonably high, go down and down and down with increasing rapidity and terror, until suddenly you have lift-off and soar majestically into the sky. So, here, we are still at a decent elevation. In the second volume, there is travel, excursions within Balbec, you’re meeting a lot of people—some a bit weird, some friends for life—and the character’s grandmother is there. She is all kindness, with a huge heart. We also meet a new love interest, who turns out to have a mole on her chin, except no, it’s actually on her cheek, except no, it’s actually on her lip. It’s a really interesting move by the narrator, to trick us that way.” Read more...
Joshua Landy, Literary Scholar
