In Search of Lost Time, Vol. V: The Prisoner

"Okay, so now we’re lower down on the ski jump. Things are getting a little bleak. It’s very claustrophobic: most of the novel is two characters in one room. It’s really the story of a love affair gone awry, a love affair that has degenerated into pathological jealousy. The main character is worried not only that his girlfriend is cheating on him, but that she’s cheating on him with women. The reason this is so upsetting to him is that he just can’t get his head around it. He can imagine a situation where she’s cheating with another man; he knows what that’s like. But he can’t imagine his way into a situation in which there are two women together, and for him that is doubly painful because he has no control, either literal or metaphorical. He can’t wrap his mind around it, and—partly because he is the jealous type, and not best-equipped to sustain a long-term love relationship, and partly because he has probably made a poor choice of partner—he ends up in this pathological situation. The reason this volume of the novel is called ‘The Captive’ is that he tries to control the movements of his partner to the extent that he can. She’s not literally a captive, but he puts pretty strong pressure on her not to go here or there. He has all kinds of spies; he sends her out with a driver, because he knows he can ask the driver later what she did and who she saw. So it’s a rather bleak volume involving a lot of jealousy, but it does have one extraordinary scene that suddenly catapults us into aesthetic bliss."