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Within a Budding Grove
- Remembrance of Things Past, Volume 2
- Narrated by: Neville Jason
- Length: 26 hrs and 18 mins
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Publisher's summary
Remembrance of Things Past is one of the monuments of 20th century literature. Neville Jason’s widely praised abridged version has rightly become an audiobook landmark and now, upon numerous requests, he is recording the whole work unabridged which, when complete, will run for some 140 hours.
Within a Budding Grove is the second of seven volumes. The young narrator, experiencing his youthful sexuality, falls under the spell of a group of adolescent girls, succumbs to the charms of the enchanting Gilberte, and visits a brothel where he meets Rachel. His impressions of life are also stimulated by the painter, Elstir, and his encounter with another girl, Albertine.
PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.
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- Narrated by: Krysten Ritter, Anthony Mackie, Tony Goldwyn, and others
- Length: 4 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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Prepare to be captivated by acclaimed crime writer Candice Fox’s gripping audio thriller, Hunting Game. Featuring an all-star cast including Krysten Ritter, Anthony Mackie, and Tony Goldwyn, you’re about to enter a high-stakes game of cat and mouse. NYPD Detective Esme 'Es' Compran (Krysten Ritter) finds herself torn between her duty and her own desperate circumstances when a child is kidnapped. The victim's father, Jack Dengate (Tony Goldwyn), is a controversial big pharma CEO whose company's price hikes on life-saving drugs have dire consequences for Es' ailing daughter.
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Man what a GREAT story….BUT……
- By ShawniqueLovesToRead on 03-15-24
By: Candice Fox
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Weeds
- By: Amanda Wilkin
- Narrated by: Lesley Sharp, Adelle Leonce, Joshua James, and others
- Length: 1 hr and 29 mins
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Climate activist Shirley Watts has dedicated her entire life to protecting the planet for future generations. But constantly fighting for Mother Earth has taken its toll over time, leaving her in a precarious relationship with her adult daughter, Lela. When Shirley’s latest climate stunt lands her in serious legal jeopardy, Lela reluctantly lets Shirley stay with her and her boyfriend while awaiting her upcoming trial.
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Excellent story
- By Jeremy J. Hanes on 03-22-24
By: Amanda Wilkin
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Ghost Stories: Stephen Fry's Definitive Collection
- By: Stephen Fry, Washington Irving, M.R. James, and others
- Narrated by: Stephen Fry
- Length: 8 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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As the days grow shorter and the temperature drops, Halloween approaches. Come, brave listener, pull up a chair, and spend some time with master storyteller Stephen Fry as he tells us some of his favourite ghost stories of all time, in truly terrifying spatial audio. From the headless horseman of Sleepy Hollow to the tortured spirits of M.R. James, from Edgar Allan Poe’s terrifying tale of a doppelganger to Charlotte Riddell’s Open Door that should definitely stay shut, join Stephen as he tells you some truly terrifying tales.
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Wonderful narration. Mediocre stories.
- By Michael Fuchs on 11-07-23
By: Stephen Fry, and others
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Find Her
- By: Sarah A. Denzil
- Narrated by: Catrin Walker-Booth
- Length: 8 hrs and 13 mins
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It’s Christmas Day at Wilder House, and three magical winter weddings are set to begin. But as the tables are arranged, and the food is prepared, a perfect storm hits, cutting every guest from the rest of the world. Most little girls dream of the perfect wedding. But this bride stumbles alone into the snow, her silk train dragging through dirt, her hands bloody from the murder she just committed. Now there is at least one killer roaming the unforgiving landscape surrounding Wilder House. Who else will die on Christmas Day?
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a little bit of wicked fun
- By A. Bohn on 01-25-24
By: Sarah A. Denzil
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The Bedroom Window
- By: K. L. Slater
- Narrated by: Clare Corbett
- Length: 8 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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My darling little boy Albie adores playing at our new neighbours’ house. And after the terrible year we’ve had, I feel so lucky that we can start over in this perfect place, with new friends who treat Albie like the son they never had. He can’t stop talking about the tree house they’re building him, and the cookies they bake together. But as time passes, something starts to feel wrong. Why don’t they ever open the front door more than a crack? They told me they had no children so who does the small pink tricycle I saw in their hall belong to?
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Miss Lucy-price Lewis
- By Angie on 06-07-23
By: K. L. Slater
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Le premier volume de la recherche.
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John Buffalo Mailer narrates his father's book
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Ulysses is regarded by many as the single most important novel of the 20th century. It tells the story of one day in Dublin, June 16th 1904, largely through the eyes of Stephen Dedalus (Joyce's alter ego from Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man) and Leopold Bloom, an advertising salesman. Both begin a normal day, and both set off on a journey around the streets of Dublin, which eventually brings them into contact with one another.
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Ulysses (Unabridged)
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What listeners say about Within a Budding Grove
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Darwin8u
- 03-28-13
One young nubile girl and then another ...
My first recommendation when reading Proust is the reader MUST make sure they have a reliable bookmark, because when (not if, but when) you lose your place your faulty memory will not be able to remember exactly where you just were. One young nubile girl starts to blend into another young nubile girl who looks at this point a lot like her friend. One picked flower starts to smell like another from an earlier page; a page that seemed to exist a whole lifetime ago. One young man with mommy issues starts to look almost exactly like another young man with grand-mommy issues.
That being said, you don't read Proust for the lines. You read Proust for everything else. It is those moments between plot points where all the rich texture resides. There is something languorous about just simply letting Proust's prose wash over you ~~~ wave after wave. Suddenly, you really don't care if you've already read a certain page because you are content and you recognize that you will read it again in just a few pages anyway and it will be beautiful and true all over again.
Neville Jason's narration is a fantastic crutch. I use the narration to keep me paced as I read the text. I tried this approach first with Joyce and it worked so well I used it with Pynchon. The listening/reading approach is perfect for Proust.
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30 people found this helpful
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- Gary
- 09-09-17
Philosophy and Psychology in guise of Literature
If one is not emotionally repulsed by the snobbery and pretentious French world at the time of the Dreyfus affair described within this book than one probably is missing out on what the author is trying to get at. Volume I needs to be read in order to follow what's going on in this book. The first fourth of the book wraps up the story from the previous volume. Marcel, the narrator's, name is not mentioned in this book and is only briefly mentioned in the first book. The maternal grandmother doesn't even recall Marcel's family name when polite convention required it. I'm intrigued by Odette (Swann's wife) and I'm anxious to see how she comes back into the story. This story mostly covers a season at a resort and how Marcel would reflect on how he experienced falling in love. Our memories are shaded by who we have become and the author illustrates that by his story telling.
Proust could best be shelved under Philosophy or Psychology rather than Literature. Our experiences of the world are determined by what our prior beliefs were weighted by our expectations of what we thought was going to happen discounted by what actually did happen. Or in other words, we are all Bayesians. Proust gets that and will show how we always are extrapolating from the past into our interpolation of the 'now' and projecting a future. Sartre quotes Proust extensively in his 'Being and Nothingness' for a reason. (Though, I seriously doubt Proust would have thought of himself as an Existentialist if he had lived into the 1940s, but I suspect he would have been comfortable with the Phenomenologist label in the style of Gadamar as laid out in 'Truth and Method'. One gets the similar lessons in each book, but Proust reads like a story instead of reading like a dry philosophy text book).
Almost every other page in this book has a wry observation or two on being-in-the-world and the story is only acting as a pretense in order for the reader to understand deeper truths about being human. The world is not best experienced by atomization (that's a Nietzsche word and sentiment and the author within this book refers to Nietzsche many times). The totality of the whole through our familiarity of our being-in-the-world is how we must cope with our understanding about our own taking a stand on our own being. Even though, we are constantly in a Bayesian trap (the author doesn't use the word Bayesian but he continuously describes how we create our experiences in those terms).
One of the wry observations the author made is that even though we may dream about animals, animals are different from humans because they have reason with certainty and humans have reason without certainty. It's not important if one agrees with that sentiment (though, I do, and it's actually one of the better definitions I've seen for what makes humans different from animals), what is fascinating about this book is it has many psychological insights that are worth pondering. Another observation, when our inclinations are formed or discovered in our youth if we deny those inclinations latter in life we will be inauthentic to ourselves and much the less for it. The author was specifically referring to himself as a writer but it's easy to generalize that sentiment in to other areas.
It's our phrases (scrapes of music, works of art, or lines in a book) that make up our life and give us our understanding for the sublime. A real artist needs to break the mimetic trap from which we our thrown into the world and break free from the imitation of the 'they'. The narrator, Marcel, believes that a great piece of art such as a great book can help us move beyond the herd mentality of the they and allow us to transcend (he'll say that or equivalently in the narrative). There are a lot of deep thoughts within this book, but one needs to discover them for oneself and just be aware that this book does not read like 'The Girl on the Train' because it has something it wants to give to the reader beyond mere mindless repetition of stale story telling.
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- Edjo
- 09-14-13
Jason Brings Proust to Life
Would you consider the audio edition of Within a Budding Grove to be better than the print version?
Yes
Which character – as performed by Neville Jason – was your favorite?
Baron de Charlus
Any additional comments?
I have just listened to all seven volumes of In Search of Lost Time so these comments apply to the whole series.
Jason's narration of this poetic work is "sans pareil." He gives all the characters a distinctive voice making it much easier to follow.His pronunciation of the french names is impeccable.
His English pronunciation is almost as good. Given Jason's mid-Atlantic plummy accent and the work's preoccupation with the upper class, his pronunciation of (the unfortunately frequently recurring word) "analogous" is teeth grating. (Hint: it should be pronounced with a hard "g.")
Nevertheless, Bravo Neville! (and of course Proust)
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- Carolyn from Santa Cruz
- 01-29-13
Mesmerizing
I found myself mesmerized by this book. Proust is a master of describing the intimate details of his thinking. Very little happens in the book outwardly. Essentially the narrator tells of his summer in a town on the Norman coast. And the characters, including the narrator, aren't particularly admirable. But it's absolutely fascinating to listen to his riffs on a wide variety of subjects, from sexuality to arts and artists to creativity to memory. Very hard to describe, but it's like listening to someone describing the incredibly interesting things they see inside a microscope looking at human character. The reader is good. Definitely kept my interest alive.
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- KMS
- 03-06-23
A great way to read a challenging book.
I would read along whilst listening to this. That way, I was able to stay focused on the long and beautiful sentences. So glad I found this.
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- Luvin Cocktails
- 08-15-17
Marvelous reading of Vol 2 of the Search
This is volume 2 of a 7 volume series comprising the entire novel "In Search of Lost Time". In this volume the maturing narrator becomes much more interested in the opposite sex, continues developing a rich fantasy life, and is motivated to pluck some flowers - it's so hard to choose! You will enjoy the intermingling of all layers of fin-de-siècle French society (from hotel crooks to the nobility) in the beach town of Balbec as the narrator exhibits stalker-like behavior as he tries to get introduced (very important in fin-de-siecle French society) to a clique of pretty young girls. Watch his carefully laid plans for meeting the girls (and also those for breaking into high society) come to naught, only to finally succeed because of a family connection: his grandmother.
Neville Jason's reading is a pleasure to listen to. He's a great voice actor, which makes it easier to identify the characters. it was quite an undertaking to read at 1.25 million words for all 7 volumes. (If all 7 volumes are not available when you read this, please put in a request for the missing volumes to Audible.)
Today, Moncrieff's title "Remembrance of Things Past" has been updated to "In Search of Lost Time", a better translation of the original French. Moncrieff's translation of what is perhaps the greatest twentieth-century novel was a work of art in itself, but the translation included some errors and is out of date. I recommend obtaining William C. Carters translation of this volume in paperback from Yale to read or browse when it becomes available, but this is still a great recording.
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- Amazon Customer
- 07-30-15
Things Change In Unexpected Ways
Where does Within a Budding Grove rank among all the audiobooks you’ve listened to so far?
As a very good one.
Who was your favorite character and why?
The Baron de Charlus, whose erratic nature causes him to steal every scene in which he appears.
Have you listened to any of Neville Jason’s other performances before? How does this one compare?
Yes, in other volumes, and he is always exceptional.
Was there a moment in the book that particularly moved you?
The scene in which the narrator has an overwhelming feeling of nostalgia and loss merely from the view of a copse of trees receding on the horizon.
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- John
- 11-19-23
Proust never ceases to astound.
On my second go at Proust he has only improved, deepened and become all the more rewarding.
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- Edward Hower
- 09-30-23
The world’s greatest novel
The worlds, greatest novel, brilliantly, read aloud! This part is as great as all the others.
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- Dr. Terence M. Dwyer
- 01-28-23
The sublime master of navel gazing
M Proust is the master of navel gazing. The title should be translated “Recalling how I wasted time”
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