Marcel Proust's Search for Lost Time

Marcel Proust's Search for Lost Time
Author: Patrick Alexander
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 402
Release: 2009-09-22
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0307472329

An accessible, irreverent guide to one of the most admired—and entertaining—novels of the past century: Rememberance of Things Past. There is no other guide like this; a user-friendly and enticing entry into the marvelously enjoyable world of Proust. At seven volumes, three thousand pages, and more than four hundred characters, as well as a towering reputation as a literary classic, Proust’s novel can seem daunting. But though begun a century ago, in 1909, it is in fact as engaging and relevant to our times as ever. Patrick Alexander is passionate about Proust’s genius and appeal—he calls the work “outrageously bawdy and extremely funny”—and in his guide he makes it more accessible to the general reader through detailed plot summaries, historical and cultural background, a guide to the fifty most important characters, maps, family trees, illustrations, and a brief biography of Proust. Essential for readers and book groups currently reading Proust and who want help keeping track of the huge cast and intricate plot, this Reader’s Guide is also a wonderful introduction for students and new readers and a memory-refresher for long-time fans.

In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust (Illustrated)

In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust (Illustrated)
Author: Marcel Proust
Publisher:
Total Pages: 110
Release: 2021-03-17
Genre:
ISBN:

No library's complete without the classics! The first volume of Proust's seven-part novel "In Search of Lost Time," also known as "A Remembrance of Things Past," "Swann's Way" is the auspicious beginning of Proust's most prominent work. A mature, unnamed man recalls the details of his commonplace, idyllic existence as a sensitive and intuitive boy in Combray. For a time, the story is narrated through his younger mind in beautiful, almost dream-like prose. In a subsequent section of the volume, the narrator tells of the excruciating romance of his country neighbor, Monsieur Swann. The narrator reverts to his childhood, where he begins a similarly hopeless infatuation with Swann's little daughter, Gilberte. More than this apparently fragmented narrative, however, is the importance of the themes of memory, time, and art that connect and interweave the man's memories. Considered to be one of the twentieth century's major novels, Proust ultimately portrays the volatility of human life in this sweeping contemplation of reality and time. Illustrated with book-end doodles about reading

The Fugitive

The Fugitive
Author: Marcel Proust
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 383
Release: 2021-01-12
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0525505539

The long-awaited penultimate volume--"the very summit of Proust's art" (Slate)--in the acclaimed Penguin translation of Marcel Proust's greatest work, in time for the 150th anniversary of his birth "The greatest literary work of the twentieth century." --The New York Times A Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition, with flaps and deckle-edged paper Peter Collier's acclaimed translation of The Fugitive introduces a new generation of American readers to the literary riches of Marcel Proust. The sixth and penultimate volume in Penguin Classics' superb new edition of In Search of Lost Time--the first completely new translation of Proust's masterpiece since the 1920s--brings us a more comic and lucid prose than readers of English have previously been able to enjoy. "Miss Albertine has left!" So begins The Fugitive, the second part of what is often referred to as "the Albertine cycle," or books five and six of In Search of Lost Time. As Marcel struggles to endure Albertine's departure and vanquish his loss, he ends up in an anguished search for the essential truth of the enigmatic fugitive, whose love affairs with other women provoke in him jealousy and a new understanding of sexuality. Eventually, he lets go of Albertine and begins to find himself, discovering his own long-lost inner sources of creativity. For more than seventy-five years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 2,000 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Proustian Uncertainties

Proustian Uncertainties
Author: Saul Friedländer
Publisher: Other Press, LLC
Total Pages: 177
Release: 2020-12-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1590519124

Named a Times Literary Supplement Best Book of the Year A Pulitzer Prize–winning historian revisits Marcel Proust’s masterpiece in this essay on literature and memory, exploring the question of identity—that of the novel’s narrator and Proust’s own. This engaging reexamination of In Search of Lost Time considers how the narrator defines himself, how this compares to what we know of Proust himself, and what the significance is of these various points of commonality and divergence. We know, for example, that the author did not hide his homosexuality, but the narrator did. Why the difference? We know that the narrator tried to marginalize his part-Jewish background. Does this reflect the author’s position, and how does the narrator handle what he tries, but does not manage, to dismiss? These are major questions raised by the text and reflected in the text, to which the author’s life doesn’t give obvious answers. The narrator’s reflections on time, on death, on memory, and on love are as many paths leading to the image of self that he projects. In Proustian Uncertainties, Saul Friedländer draws on his personal experience from a life spent investigating the ties between history and memory to offer a fresh perspective on the seminal work.

Lost Time

Lost Time
Author: Jozef Czapski
Publisher: New York Review of Books
Total Pages: 137
Release: 2018-11-06
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1681372592

The first translation of painter and writer Józef Czapski's inspiring lectures on Proust, first delivered in a prison camp in the Soviet Union during World War II. During the Second World War, as a prisoner of war in a Soviet camp, and with nothing but memory to go on, the Polish artist and soldier Józef Czapski brought Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time to life for an audience of prison inmates. In a series of lectures, Czapski described the arc and import of Proust’s masterpiece, sketched major and minor characters in striking detail, and movingly evoked the work’s originality, depth, and beauty. Eric Karpeles has translated this brilliant and ­altogether unparalleled feat of the critical imagination into English for the first time, and in a thoughtful introduction he brings out how, in reckoning with Proust’s great meditation on memory, Czapski helped his fellow officers to remember that there was a world apart from the world of the camp. Proust had staked the art of the novelist against the losses of a lifetime and the imminence of death. Recalling that triumphant wager, unfolding, like Sheherazade, the intricacies of Proust’s world night after night, Czapski showed to men at the end of their tether that the past remained present and there was a future in which to hope.

The Modern Library In Search of Lost Time, Complete and Unabridged 6-Book Bundle

The Modern Library In Search of Lost Time, Complete and Unabridged 6-Book Bundle
Author: Marcel Proust
Publisher: Modern Library
Total Pages: 4175
Release: 2012-02-06
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0679645683

Now in a convenient eBook bundle, this Modern Library edition provides the most authoritative, critically acclaimed translation of Marcel Proust’s masterpiece in six volumes, In Search of Lost Time, which includes Swann’s Way, Within a Budding Grove, The Guermantes Way, Sodom and Gomorrah, The Captive, The Fugitive, and Time Regained. Graham Greene considered Marcel Proust “the greatest novelist of the twentieth century, just as Tolstoy was in the nineteenth.” Edmund Wilson proposed that he was “perhaps the last great historian of the loves.” And Virginia Woolf celebrated Proust for “his combination of the utmost sensibility with the utmost tenacity.” The prolific French master dazzled many of the most cherished authors of our time, and now his signature work comes alive in this practical and completely accessible eBook bundle. For these Modern Library volumes, D. J. Enright revised the late Terence Kilmartin’s acclaimed reworkings of C. K. Scott Moncrieff’s and Andreas Mayor’s translations to match the definitive French editions published in recent decades. Expertly and lovingly crafted to rival Marcel Proust’s original in elegance, precision, and emotional resonance, here is In Search of Lost Time as it was meant to be read.

In Search of Lost Time

In Search of Lost Time
Author: Marcel Proust
Publisher:
Total Pages:
Release: 2015
Genre: France
ISBN: 9788893157483

"'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 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. "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.

Proust's Way: A Field Guide to In Search of Lost Time

Proust's Way: A Field Guide to In Search of Lost Time
Author: Roger Shattuck
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 300
Release: 2011-02-07
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0393078701

"Shattuck leaves us not only with a deepened appreciation of Proust's great work but of all great literature as well."—Richard Bernstein, New York Times For any reader who has been humbled by the language, the density, or the sheer weight of Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time, Roger Shattuck is a godsend. Winner of the National Book Award for Marcel Proust, a sweeping examination of Proust's life and works, Shattuck now offers a useful and eminently readable guidebook to Proust's epic masterpiece, and a contemplation of memory and consciousness throughout great literature. Here, Shattuck laments Proust's defenselessness against zealous editors, praises some translations, and presents Proust as a novelist whose philosophical gifts were matched only by his irrepressible comic sense. Proust's Way, the culmination of a lifetime of scholarship, will serve as the next generation's guide to one of the world's finest writers of fiction.

Sodom and Gomorrah

Sodom and Gomorrah
Author: Marcel Proust
Publisher: Open Road Media
Total Pages: 529
Release: 2023-01-01
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1504083849

“Widely recognized as the major novel of the twentieth century,” this French coming-of-age story in the tradition of philosophical fiction (Harold Bloom, literary critic). Sodom and Gomorrah is the fourth volume of Marcel Proust’s masterpiece, In Search of Lost Time, and the last publication from the French literary classic that Proust was able to preside over before his death in 1922. Touching on homosexuality for the first time, Sodom and Gomorrah is also a penetrating, often comic portrayal of French high society as well as a metaphysical exploration of the nature of time, memory, art, love, and death. “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

In Search of Lost Time, Volume I

In Search of Lost Time, Volume I
Author: Marcel Proust
Publisher: Modern Library
Total Pages: 601
Release: 2000-11-01
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0679641785

'The transmutation of sensation into sentiment, the ebb tide of memory, waves of emotion such as desire, jealousy, and artistic euphoria--this is the material of this enormous and yet singularly light and translucid work. --VLADIMIR NABOKOV In the overture to Swann's Way, the themes of the whole of In Search of Lost Time are introduced, and the narrator's childhood in Paris and Combray is recalled, most memorably in the evocation of the famous maternal good-night kiss. The recollection of the narrator's love for Swann's daughter Gilberte leads to an account of Swann's passion for Odette and the rise of the nouveaux riches Verdurins. The final volume of a new, definitive text of A la recherche du temps perdu was published by the Bibliotheque de la Pleiade in 1989. For this authoritative English-language edition, D. J. Enright has revised the late Terence Kilmartin's acclaimed reworking of C. K. Scott Moncrieff's translation to take into account the new French editions.