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. 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. However, his position there was also one of an outsider, due to his Jewishness and homosexuality. He was active in Parisian high society during the 80s and 90s, welcomed in the most fashionable and exclusive salons of his day. 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.īorn in the first year of the Third Republic, the young Marcel, like his narrator, was a delicate child from a bourgeois family. Scott Moncrieff’s translation to take into account the new definitive French editions of À la recherche du temps perdu (the final volume of these new editions was published by the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade in 1989).
Enright has revised the late Terence Kilmartin’s acclaimed reworking of C. 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.įor this authoritative English-language edition, D. 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.
Proust continued to work on it until his final illness in the autumn of 1922 forced him to break off. "In Search of Lost Time" is a novel in seven volumes. But for most readers it is the characters of the novel who loom the largest: 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. 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.
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