Carnets

by Marcel Proust

Tout lecteur de la Recherche s'est demandé comment Proust avait commencé ; comment, après des années de désirs et de faux départs, il s'était mis pour de bon à écrire son grand roman. Il n'y eut pas de miracle ; on ne peut pas fixer de date à laquelle les obstacles furent levés, ni de révélation qui aurait définitivement guéri l'écrivain du doute. « Suis-je romancier ? » se demande-t-il encore avec anxiété au moment de se lancer dans l'oeuvre. Cependant, les quatre petits carnets déposés à la Bibliothèque nationale de France, auprès des cahiers de brouillon et de mise au net, constituent le meilleur témoignage des débuts hésitants de l'oeuvre, puis de son prodigieux accroissement. Ces carnets ont accompagné Proust dans la création de la Recherche de 1908 à 1918. Ils contiennent des notes tant préparatoires que complémentaires pour l'ensemble du roman en chantier. Florence Callu et Antoine Compagnon en donnent une transcription intégrale et annotée, à la fois fidèle et lisible, qui permettra à l'amateur de la Recherche de découvrir l'atelier de l'écrivain.

444 pages, Paperback

First published February 24, 2002

About the author

Marcel Proust was a French novelist, best known for his 3000 page masterpiece À la recherche du temps perdu (Remembrance of Things Past or In Search of Lost Time), a pseudo-autobiographical novel told mostly in a stream-of-consciousness style.

Born in the first year of the Third Republic, the young Marcel, like his narrator, was a delicate child from a bourgeois family. He was active in Parisian high society during the 80s and 90s, welcomed in the most fashionable and exclusive salons of his day. However, his position there was also one of an outsider, due to his Jewishness and homosexuality. Towards the end of 1890s Proust began to withdraw more and more from society, and although he was never entirely reclusive, as is sometimes made out, he lapsed more completely into his lifelong tendency to sleep during the day and work at night. He was also plagued with severe asthma, which had troubled him intermittently since childhood, and a terror of his own death, especially in case it should come before his novel had been completed. The first volume, after some difficulty finding a publisher, came out in 1913, and Proust continued to work with an almost inhuman dedication on his masterpiece right up until his death in 1922, at the age of 51.

Today he is widely recognized as one of the greatest authors of the 20th Century, and À la recherche du temps perdu as one of the most dazzling and significant works of literature to be written in modern times.