Remembrance of Things Past (In Search of Lost Time)
The narrator feeds a swan a medeleine, a type of cake which looks like a shell. Then he goes to bed early. When he wakes up he does it again, like Groundhog Day but in French. There is a lesbian scene, which is also one of the seven basic plots [see previous entry]. On a visit to the seaside he trips over a shell. This involuntarily summons an image of the madeleine, which has turned up again back home and which he now uses as a paperweight. While at the beach he loses his watch in the sands of time. We fast forward to Sodom and Gomorrah, both of which the narrator visited as a child; they left deep impressions, like the shell of a madeleine.
The destruction of Sodom & Gomorroh (twinned like Brighton & Hove). Madeleines not to scale.
A lesbian is taken captive but released with no hard feelings. Later Swan dies: he was a man, not a bird after all. The narrator visits Venice with his mother, who complains about the plumbing. A telegram arrives informing him that there is a fugitive on the loose by mistake, but it has been spelled ‘lose’ instead, whatever the French is for that, and he ignores it. “I don’t care,” he says, but he does because he is basically a decent man. In the final volume of this masterful work the narrator visits Paris and writes a long review for TripAdvisor praising in particular the madeleines. He realises that the only way to escape from this endless series of Groundhog Days is to accept your life’s baggage and always make room for it. He then bites into the ancient madeleine and wakes up. Was it all a dream? No, he’s chipped a tooth.
He never does find his watch.