Notes sur la lecture: Sur la lecture, suivi de Journées de Lecture

by Marcel Proust

Ces deux textes peu connus de Marcel Proust sont deux véritables clés pour lire et comprendre À la recherche du temps perdu. "Sur la lecture" est dédié à son amie la Princesse de Caraman-Chimay (1860-1952), issue d'une famille d'aristocrates qui fascinait tant Proust, et figure qui inspira à l'écrivain le personnage de la duchesse de Guermantes dans À la recherche du temps perdu. Marcel Proust se souvient avec délectation, mais sans sensiblerie, de ses lectures d'enfant, en famille, le soir au coin du feu, et de ses héros imaginaires. il fut écrit pour servir de préface à la traduction d'un recueil de John Ruskin (Sésame et les lys, traduit par Proust) quand Proust, âgé de trente-cinq ans, est encore inconnu. Proust y met déjà en place ce qui deviendra plus tard la poétique proustienne d'où l'intérêt de se replonger sans cet écrit de jeunesse. "Journées de lecture" fut un texte longtemps oublié de Proust. Redécouvert récemment, il y est aussi question de la pratique de la lecture vue par Marcel Proust, c'est-à-dire avec son style déjà reconnaissable entre mille, fait de longues phrases au rythme envoûtant, de réflexions diverses et d'introspection.

68 pages, Paperback

Published January 21, 2022

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.