The titles of the two volumes here somewhat align with my experience of reading them. The Captive, while still sprinkled with lovely passages, obsessively recapitulates the same problem (ie relationships with women as filtered through Albertine) from only slightly varied, and often repeated angles of attack. After a point, I felt like Proust ought to move his stethoscope to a different spot. In The Fugitive the book opens up like a flower, and Proust's virtuosity has returned, this time as a tailwind, speeding the reader at a breezy pace through its short sections. The "Sojourn in Venice" in particular was mindblowing. The soap opera twists of The Fugitive are also just fun, and allow Proust to return to a more interesting and ironically captivating register.