L'humour de Marcel Proust

by Marcel Proust, Philippe Pierrelee (Illustrator), Bertrand Leclair (Editor)

"À la recherche du temps perdu ne ressemble à aucun autre ouvrage, et, comme Proust le dit et le redit, la difficulté que nous éprouvons face aux oeuvres réellement nouvelles tient d'abord à nos habitudes, perturbés que nous sommes de ne pas les y retrouver, confrontés à une vision du monde qui demande un temps d'acclimatation, qui réclame au lecteur un changement d'optique, voire une nouvelle paire de jumelles. Quel meilleur moyen de l'aborder, cependant, et d'en découvrir tout le sel, que les rires et les sourires que le narrateur nous arrache à longueur de chapitre ?" Bertrand Leclair.

208 pages, Pocket Book

Published October 20, 2016

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.

Reviews

[Pinar · Rating 4 out of 5]

"...notre jalousie fouillant le passé pour en tirer des inductions n'y trouve rien ; toujours rétrospective, elle est comme un historien qui aurait à faire une histoire pour laquelle il n'est aucun document ; toujours en retard, elle se précipite comme un taureau furieux là où ne se trouve pas l'être fier et brillant qui l'irrite de ses piqûres et dont la foule cruelle admire la magnificence et la ruse."