Two years after the love affair with Gilbert, the narrator goes with his grandmother to the whale town of Belbek, located on the Normandy coast. "Place names: the place" is a departure from the northern dream in the name of a place to the place itself. A sad departure, since the name is one and only, and as such is unattainable. Thus, the narrator arrives at the church that in his imagination he saw standing on the edge of a cliff facing the ocean, and here it stands sooty in the heart of a city, at a railroad crossing, in front of the "Billiard" cafe. The narrator forms a friendship with the Marquis de Saint-Lo, an intellectual of unusual beauty, who is captive to destructive love affairs with the actress Rachel, which cover up a homosexual tendency, which will become clear later in the novel. Bloch, the Jewish friend of the narrator, who already appeared in the first volume, also spends the summer in Balbec. A picture is drawn of a Jewish family that is not without internalized anti-Semitism. The boy-narrator gets to know the painter Alastair, whose days of greatness are already behind him, and stands for the dynamic relationship between the spiritual development of the artist and the nature of his art. Alastair teaches him two things, or rather, everything: what is reality and what is art. If God created things by naming them, then the artist creates them anew by erasing their previous name and giving it a new name.
