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The Greatest Writers of All Time
Proust, Marcel: In Search of Lost Time [volumes 1 to 7] (Book Center)
"'In Search of Lost Time' is widely recognized as the major novel of the twentieth century." —Harold Bloom
"At once the last great classic of French epic prose tradition and the towering precursor of the 'nouveau roman'." —Bengt Holmqvist
"Proust so titillates my own desire for expression that I can hardly set out the sentence. Oh if I could write like that!" —Virginia Woolf
"The greatest fiction to date." —W. Somerset Maugham
"Proust is the greatest novelist of the 20th century." —Graham Greene
On the surface a traditional "Bildungsroman" describing the narrator's journey of self-discovery, this huge and complex book is also a panoramic and richly comic portrait of France in the author's lifetime, and a profound meditation on the nature of art, love, time, memory and death. But for most readers it is the characters of the novel who loom the Swann and Odette, Monsieur de Charlus, Morel, the Duchesse de Guermantes, Françoise, Saint-Loup and so many others — Giants, as the author calls them, immersed in Time.
"In Search of Lost Time" is a novel in seven volumes. The novel began to take shape in 1909. Proust continued to work on it until his final illness in the autumn of 1922 forced him to break off. Proust established the structure early on, but even after volumes were initially finished he kept adding new material, and edited one volume after another for publication. The last three of the seven volumes contain oversights and fragmentary or unpolished passages as they existed in draft form at the death of the author; the publication of these parts was overseen by his brother Robert.
"At once the last great classic of French epic prose tradition and the towering precursor of the 'nouveau roman'." —Bengt Holmqvist
"Proust so titillates my own desire for expression that I can hardly set out the sentence. Oh if I could write like that!" —Virginia Woolf
"The greatest fiction to date." —W. Somerset Maugham
"Proust is the greatest novelist of the 20th century." —Graham Greene
On the surface a traditional "Bildungsroman" describing the narrator's journey of self-discovery, this huge and complex book is also a panoramic and richly comic portrait of France in the author's lifetime, and a profound meditation on the nature of art, love, time, memory and death. But for most readers it is the characters of the novel who loom the Swann and Odette, Monsieur de Charlus, Morel, the Duchesse de Guermantes, Françoise, Saint-Loup and so many others — Giants, as the author calls them, immersed in Time.
"In Search of Lost Time" is a novel in seven volumes. The novel began to take shape in 1909. Proust continued to work on it until his final illness in the autumn of 1922 forced him to break off. Proust established the structure early on, but even after volumes were initially finished he kept adding new material, and edited one volume after another for publication. The last three of the seven volumes contain oversights and fragmentary or unpolished passages as they existed in draft form at the death of the author; the publication of these parts was overseen by his brother Robert.
3053 pages, Kindle Edition
Published March 19, 2017
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About the author
Marcel Proust
2,157 books7,483 followersMarcel 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.
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.
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April 18, 2021
This is a review of specifically volume 7, Time Regained from the Kindle edition, In Search of Lost Time, • ASIN : B06XP56C9D, translation by C.K. Scott Moncrieff. This particular version is under review at Amazon and may never again be available. I have read much of book one in this edition and slices of several other of the volumes and all of Volume 7. This is a Kindle copy with errors in the transcription although not so many as to be overly distracting. I can recommend this edition as a way to read the entire sequence for what was for me 0.99 USD. There are several newer editions by more modern translators. If you find the original and near Proustian contemporary Moncrief translation a bit stodgy and overly delicate, I strongly recommend the Deluxe Penguin Classic, Editions.Each volume by a separate translator and having unique characteristics. As of this date, volume 7 is not available in the Penguin Classic Deluxe edition.
In reviewing Volume 7, I am taking the entire sequence as a single book and will refer to earlier book as necessary.
Bottom line, I can recommend In Search of Lost Time, AKA Remembrance of Things Past but with a long list of disclaimers. This is technically a blundisroamin as the narrator, Marcel recalls his youth and maturation. It is more generally classed as a very early stream of conscious. Although we are never in is conscious as we are in his memories. A very important distinction. My warnings are that the entire book, all seven volumes runs to over 4000 pages. Proust wrote much of it using very , Very, did I say Very?... long sentences, and just as long paragraphs with only an incidental nod to the notion a sentence is supposed to be 1 idea. Proust ignores most conventions as they regard to new paragraphs for each speaker and the result is that you can lose track of time awaiting the end of a sentence never mind the paragraph. At least one famous commentator remarked that the most popular, and readable Proust was a Polish translation for the simple reason that the translator applied the rules for marking paragraphs. Beyond the structure, Proust makes a point of making every possible point and many of them more than once, in a row. This is not a book challenge for the faint of heart and may only be for the highly literary-minded reader, or the one who just wants to say: “I did it.”
A convention I will use throughout the review is that references to Proust are to the author. References to Marcel are to the narrator. Many claim that this is a barely concealed autobiography. It is a novel. The author is free to invent people, places and times. All authors are constrained to write what they know. Proust chose to keep himself to the end of the Belle Epoch in France, almost entirely among the titled and using his many contacts in that milieu as his base for commentary.
Conventionally the 7 volumes describe a blundisroamin describing the steps as the very young Marcel matures to finally decide to write, that is to write this book. The style is a variation of stream of conscious, but Proust makes it very clear that this is a stream of memory. The narration would have us believe we are observing things as they happened, but the author and narrator tell us MANY times, many many times that all anyone has is what is stored in layers of memory, built in the same was an oyster secreting layers to form a pearl. This comparison is made by Marcel. Therefore, everything related is from memory and limited to the narrator’s point of view. So, the entire book is first person with almost no notion that another point of view might ever be worth knowing. There is also some debate on this point, but I am convinced that the book has to be read as a satire as much as fictional reportage. Marcel is a child and protégé of the French titled classes from the end of the 19th Century to the period immediately after World War One. Even when he is speaking of his near dog like pack following of society, he is writing much at their expense. He is a regular at the most select, inner society parties and dinners and while practicing, from an early age the most popular , or basest forms of snobbery, he makes plain the scheming, two faced, decadence of virtually everyone he knows including any he claims to love.
Much is made of how frequently male authors fail to write convincing female characters. For those women we only meet in the form of society profiles, we can argue that Marcel cannot claim to know anything of the inner life or actual character of any person in the book, male or otherwise. He has only one model for the experience of love. That model is from the characters Swann and Odette, and is played out from a time before Marcel could have any awareness of them as a couple. They are of a generation at one before his time. This love affair is laid out in genuinely heart rendering detail in vole one, but by volume 7 it is old stale and fails to ring true. The women are all courtesans, or virtue for common hire, many lesbians and by manipulating their lovers they boot strap themselves into high positions. All of them, every time and this is critical once we get to Marcel on inherited characteristics. At whatever cost to me, I propose that Proust as a homosexual- he was not shy about this fact -had either no notion of heterosexual love, made this part of his satire, or did not care to think of another way to handle romantic love.
Marcel in love is given to us in the volumes, The Prisoner and The Fugitive. A clue as to how messed up, or funny<?> Marcel is as a man in love.
For much of the book, Marcel is taken by almost every aspect of the title nobility. That he should be among them is apparently his only life’s purpose. Marcel toils not, neither do he spin, to borrow the expression but he begins by loving a Duchesse from affair, uses one of her cousins to gain entry into her dinners and exclusive salons. From early on he makes case after case that the nobility, borne of many generations of nobility carry forward all that is noble in French Society. Mealtime these highly noble people are scheming, cheating and being as petty as any stereotypical scrub woman. Ultimately, we will see them, aged, decrepit and feeble. Never does these inbreed people carry forward the less noble signs of inbreeding, the Hapsburg lip, or Queen Victoria’s disease, but they are ultimately traduced by the entry at the highest level of women who began at the lowest.
By book 7 I found Marcel very hard to like. He is very two faced about his rejection of lesbians, although very quick to accept lesbianism as a charge against any woman. Marcel, tends to have excuses for homosexuality among his male friends. At least one of them carries their sexual preferences into more than the sometimes-called rough trade. Another marries one of Marcel long time female friends, and almost immediately betrays her with men and women. And not limiting his choices to those of his class. In many of the books Marcel admits to thieving from his person maid servant, betraying his lovers, and in fact what he describes as his love always reads as a trivial, if jealous and manipulatives set of emotions.
In Time Regained Marcel will disparage old age, not for what it does to the person who manages to live that long, but only from his perspective. Old age, in others, imposes upon Marcel because has to remember wrinkled and fat old people that he carries in his mind as young and vital. Arthritis is not a cause of pain for the person so suffering, it is a social, recognition problem for the often-sick Marcel. Both Marcel, the narrator and Proust the author live under dire threat of ill health. Proust died before he had finished the last volumes of his novel. Likely a better self-edited thousand or so pages may have made for a more charitable outlook towards those , fictional or otherwise who would out live the writer, or do so in better health than the narrator.
On the subject of Proust as an author of art.
In any instance of received wisdom, each new generation has a duty to test qualification of what had been deemed a classic against more contemporary understandings of the term. Allowing for the generally acknowledged opinion that Marcel Proust could achieve some brilliance in his use of words, I will grant that perhaps he does not translate well. I also grant that there are many (100’s, 1000’s?) phrases and insights that glitter like unto gold. There are others that stand no level of analysis and the fact is that reading Proust can be like standing in a waterfall, watching many jewel-like glints; while working avoid drowning.
Time to mention that we now have evidence that Proust paid for some of the first of the critical reviews that praised his newly (self) published first volume.
From other sources, my impression is that Proust was attempting to do with language what the Impressionists did with paint. He was very influenced by what was then a new style inpainting. The idea for an observer of an impressionist painting is to gloss over the many thousands of times the artist’s brush dotted the riverscape (for example) and admire how wonderfully the idea of observing a riverscape emerges from what had to have been a lot of painted dots. In turn, Proust lays out his novel in o, so many words, almost demanding that we notice his every stroke of the pen and take as integral to the reading experience that the pattern of his novel can only be seen as it emerges from among so—very—many—words.
However much Marcel wants us to react to the ending of the Belle Epoch, he is most certainly seeking to have his say on what was then an emerging understanding of life. We as humans have only our senses. Reality for each of us is nothing other than what we initially receive via our senses and store in memory. There is no present and the future is unknown. All we have is what we have received as sensory input and stored in memory. Against this limitation, he will claim that it is ONLY (His word) via the memory of artists, that anyone can have access to what was prior to the reader’s experience. The accumulation of learning, science and the rest is what artists translate from specific events into a more generalized picture, that the rest of us can access for the purpose of regaining memories that would otherwise be lost.
In reviewing Volume 7, I am taking the entire sequence as a single book and will refer to earlier book as necessary.
Bottom line, I can recommend In Search of Lost Time, AKA Remembrance of Things Past but with a long list of disclaimers. This is technically a blundisroamin as the narrator, Marcel recalls his youth and maturation. It is more generally classed as a very early stream of conscious. Although we are never in is conscious as we are in his memories. A very important distinction. My warnings are that the entire book, all seven volumes runs to over 4000 pages. Proust wrote much of it using very , Very, did I say Very?... long sentences, and just as long paragraphs with only an incidental nod to the notion a sentence is supposed to be 1 idea. Proust ignores most conventions as they regard to new paragraphs for each speaker and the result is that you can lose track of time awaiting the end of a sentence never mind the paragraph. At least one famous commentator remarked that the most popular, and readable Proust was a Polish translation for the simple reason that the translator applied the rules for marking paragraphs. Beyond the structure, Proust makes a point of making every possible point and many of them more than once, in a row. This is not a book challenge for the faint of heart and may only be for the highly literary-minded reader, or the one who just wants to say: “I did it.”
A convention I will use throughout the review is that references to Proust are to the author. References to Marcel are to the narrator. Many claim that this is a barely concealed autobiography. It is a novel. The author is free to invent people, places and times. All authors are constrained to write what they know. Proust chose to keep himself to the end of the Belle Epoch in France, almost entirely among the titled and using his many contacts in that milieu as his base for commentary.
Conventionally the 7 volumes describe a blundisroamin describing the steps as the very young Marcel matures to finally decide to write, that is to write this book. The style is a variation of stream of conscious, but Proust makes it very clear that this is a stream of memory. The narration would have us believe we are observing things as they happened, but the author and narrator tell us MANY times, many many times that all anyone has is what is stored in layers of memory, built in the same was an oyster secreting layers to form a pearl. This comparison is made by Marcel. Therefore, everything related is from memory and limited to the narrator’s point of view. So, the entire book is first person with almost no notion that another point of view might ever be worth knowing. There is also some debate on this point, but I am convinced that the book has to be read as a satire as much as fictional reportage. Marcel is a child and protégé of the French titled classes from the end of the 19th Century to the period immediately after World War One. Even when he is speaking of his near dog like pack following of society, he is writing much at their expense. He is a regular at the most select, inner society parties and dinners and while practicing, from an early age the most popular , or basest forms of snobbery, he makes plain the scheming, two faced, decadence of virtually everyone he knows including any he claims to love.
Much is made of how frequently male authors fail to write convincing female characters. For those women we only meet in the form of society profiles, we can argue that Marcel cannot claim to know anything of the inner life or actual character of any person in the book, male or otherwise. He has only one model for the experience of love. That model is from the characters Swann and Odette, and is played out from a time before Marcel could have any awareness of them as a couple. They are of a generation at one before his time. This love affair is laid out in genuinely heart rendering detail in vole one, but by volume 7 it is old stale and fails to ring true. The women are all courtesans, or virtue for common hire, many lesbians and by manipulating their lovers they boot strap themselves into high positions. All of them, every time and this is critical once we get to Marcel on inherited characteristics. At whatever cost to me, I propose that Proust as a homosexual- he was not shy about this fact -had either no notion of heterosexual love, made this part of his satire, or did not care to think of another way to handle romantic love.
Marcel in love is given to us in the volumes, The Prisoner and The Fugitive. A clue as to how messed up, or funny<?> Marcel is as a man in love.
For much of the book, Marcel is taken by almost every aspect of the title nobility. That he should be among them is apparently his only life’s purpose. Marcel toils not, neither do he spin, to borrow the expression but he begins by loving a Duchesse from affair, uses one of her cousins to gain entry into her dinners and exclusive salons. From early on he makes case after case that the nobility, borne of many generations of nobility carry forward all that is noble in French Society. Mealtime these highly noble people are scheming, cheating and being as petty as any stereotypical scrub woman. Ultimately, we will see them, aged, decrepit and feeble. Never does these inbreed people carry forward the less noble signs of inbreeding, the Hapsburg lip, or Queen Victoria’s disease, but they are ultimately traduced by the entry at the highest level of women who began at the lowest.
By book 7 I found Marcel very hard to like. He is very two faced about his rejection of lesbians, although very quick to accept lesbianism as a charge against any woman. Marcel, tends to have excuses for homosexuality among his male friends. At least one of them carries their sexual preferences into more than the sometimes-called rough trade. Another marries one of Marcel long time female friends, and almost immediately betrays her with men and women. And not limiting his choices to those of his class. In many of the books Marcel admits to thieving from his person maid servant, betraying his lovers, and in fact what he describes as his love always reads as a trivial, if jealous and manipulatives set of emotions.
In Time Regained Marcel will disparage old age, not for what it does to the person who manages to live that long, but only from his perspective. Old age, in others, imposes upon Marcel because has to remember wrinkled and fat old people that he carries in his mind as young and vital. Arthritis is not a cause of pain for the person so suffering, it is a social, recognition problem for the often-sick Marcel. Both Marcel, the narrator and Proust the author live under dire threat of ill health. Proust died before he had finished the last volumes of his novel. Likely a better self-edited thousand or so pages may have made for a more charitable outlook towards those , fictional or otherwise who would out live the writer, or do so in better health than the narrator.
On the subject of Proust as an author of art.
In any instance of received wisdom, each new generation has a duty to test qualification of what had been deemed a classic against more contemporary understandings of the term. Allowing for the generally acknowledged opinion that Marcel Proust could achieve some brilliance in his use of words, I will grant that perhaps he does not translate well. I also grant that there are many (100’s, 1000’s?) phrases and insights that glitter like unto gold. There are others that stand no level of analysis and the fact is that reading Proust can be like standing in a waterfall, watching many jewel-like glints; while working avoid drowning.
Time to mention that we now have evidence that Proust paid for some of the first of the critical reviews that praised his newly (self) published first volume.
From other sources, my impression is that Proust was attempting to do with language what the Impressionists did with paint. He was very influenced by what was then a new style inpainting. The idea for an observer of an impressionist painting is to gloss over the many thousands of times the artist’s brush dotted the riverscape (for example) and admire how wonderfully the idea of observing a riverscape emerges from what had to have been a lot of painted dots. In turn, Proust lays out his novel in o, so many words, almost demanding that we notice his every stroke of the pen and take as integral to the reading experience that the pattern of his novel can only be seen as it emerges from among so—very—many—words.
However much Marcel wants us to react to the ending of the Belle Epoch, he is most certainly seeking to have his say on what was then an emerging understanding of life. We as humans have only our senses. Reality for each of us is nothing other than what we initially receive via our senses and store in memory. There is no present and the future is unknown. All we have is what we have received as sensory input and stored in memory. Against this limitation, he will claim that it is ONLY (His word) via the memory of artists, that anyone can have access to what was prior to the reader’s experience. The accumulation of learning, science and the rest is what artists translate from specific events into a more generalized picture, that the rest of us can access for the purpose of regaining memories that would otherwise be lost.
June 23, 2021
I listened to the dramatised version of this which stimulated me to start listening to the actual book, starting with Schwanns's Way.
The dramatised version is much much shorter and very engaging. Schwann's Way is slower and at times, not engaging at all. I am not sure that I will finish it as it is a struggle.
However, I enjoyed the dramatised version so much that I followed it with "How Proust can change your Life by Alain de Botton. The two books complement each other.
The dramatised version is much much shorter and very engaging. Schwann's Way is slower and at times, not engaging at all. I am not sure that I will finish it as it is a struggle.
However, I enjoyed the dramatised version so much that I followed it with "How Proust can change your Life by Alain de Botton. The two books complement each other.
February 9, 2024
Only posting this to show off. I read it all while I was working on my PhD - before the age of 26, I should add. Two volumes a year over three years. You can do it. And yes - worth the effort. 10 stars!
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews