A la recherche: “the less-read middle volumes”

In The Weather in Proust (2011), Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick notes that a dynamic peculiar to specific passages in Proust—a dynamic she calls “a kind of stink bomb of banality”—is “especially prominent in the less-read middle volumes of” A la recherche (22).

While I’m some months away from the middle volumes, I’ve had reason to flip recently through a mid-century, 3-volume edition of A la recherche, and I’ve been struck by the shape that Vol. 2 is in. It is much sturdier than Volumes 1 and 3.

A gallery: