Time Regained

À la recherche du temps perdu #7

by Marcel Proust, Terence Kilmartin (Translator), Andreas Mayor (Translator)

The final volume of In Search of Lost Time chronicles the years of World War I, when, as M. de Charlus reflects on a moonlit walk, Paris threatens to become another Pompeii. Years later, after the war's end, Proust's narrator returns to Paris, where Mme. Verdurin has become the Princesse de Guermantes. He reflects on time, reality, jealousy, artistic creation, and the raw material for literature-his past life. This volume also includes the indispensable Guide to Proust, an index to all six volumes of the novel.

Genres: Classics, Fiction, France, Literature, French Literature, Novels, 20th Century

784 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1927

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

[Gerard]

Un llibre excepcional que demana una lectura atenta per la seva complexitat. Proust divideix el llibre en tres parts diferenciades que li serveix per dur a terme un disseccionament de la societat francesa de la 1a guerra Mundial però a la vegada s'endinsa en la profunditat de l'ésser influït per les teories freudianes.

[quim]

La tendresa amb què tracta Proust els sentiments dels nostres cossos és el que fa d'aquest llibre l'obra d'art que m'ha emocionat més a la meva vida. El vertigen, la por de caure que sorgeix de llegir-se a un mateix; la malenconia al sentir el temps perdut que determina qui som.

[Paladí del temps]

després de llegir-lo he estat aplaudint sol a casa 10 minuts

[Miquel]

Com diria Lo Cartanyà: "I fins aquí Lo Temps"!