French · b. 1871
Prix Goncourt (1919) for In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower
Marcel Proust was a French novelist whose seven-volume masterpiece In Search of Lost Time is widely considered the greatest novel ever written, a work of extraordinary length and equally extraordinary precision about time, memory, and consciousness.
Marcel Proust spent the last fourteen years of his life in a cork-lined room in Paris, writing. The result — seven volumes, approximately 1.5 million words, published between 1913 and 1927 — is In Search of Lost Time, a novel so vast and so precise that it has no real competitors. It is the novel that most fully describes the experience of being conscious: what it is like to desire, to remember, to observe, to suffer from jealousy, to move through social life performing a version of yourself.
The premise is deceptively simple. The narrator, lying in bed unable to sleep, tries to recover the past through memory. A madeleine dipped in tea unlocks a flood of involuntary recollection — the experience that organizes the entire work. But this summary tells you almost nothing about what it is like to read Proust, which is to enter a consciousness of unusual sensitivity and intelligence that processes every experience with total fidelity and unhurried completeness. Proust’s sentences are long not because he is verbose but because his sentences are trying to capture something that shorter sentences cannot hold: the way an impression is actually experienced, with all its qualifications and reversals and unexpected additions.
The social world Proust depicts — the aristocratic salons and seaside resorts and Parisian apartments of the Belle Époque — is rendered with the eye of both an insider and an analyst. He grew up on the edge of that world, connected through family and ambition but never quite belonging to it, and his account of snobbery, social aspiration, and the terrible emptiness at the centre of society life is among the most acute in any literature. The comedy is real; so is the devastation. To read Proust is to understand both how time destroys everything and how, through the act of writing, it might be partially recovered.
by Marcel Proust
The final volume of In Search of Lost Time returns to the narrator's childhood world — now transformed by war and age — and arrives at the great epiphany: the experience of involuntary memory that he finally understands as the material of which his novel must be made.
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by Marcel Proust
The second volume of In Search of Lost Time follows the narrator's adolescent infatuations, his deepening friendships, and above all his summer at the seaside resort of Balbec — where he meets the circle of girls, including Albertine, who will dominate his inner life.
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by Marcel Proust
The narrator moves to Paris and becomes obsessed with the aristocratic Guermantes family — particularly the Duchess — whose drawing rooms represent the pinnacle of French society, while his grandmother's death delivers the most affecting grief in any novel.
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by Marcel Proust
The fourth volume opens with the narrator's discovery that the Baron de Charlus is homosexual and follows the consequences through the upper echelons of French society — Proust's most extended treatment of same-sex desire and his most sociological.
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by Marcel Proust
The first volume of Marcel Proust's seven-volume In Search of Lost Time, Swann's Way begins with the narrator's memory of childhood in Combray, triggered by the taste of a madeleine dipped in tea, and extends into a long account of Charles Swann's consuming love for Odette de Crécy.
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by Marcel Proust
Albertine is living with the narrator in Paris, and he is consumed by jealousy, surveillance, and the impossibility of knowing another person's inner life — Proust's most claustrophobic and psychologically intense volume.
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Where to start with Marcel Proust — whether to begin with Swann's Way, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, or The Guermantes Way. A complete reading guide.
guide
Marcel Proust books in order — how to read In Search of Lost Time, the seven-volume masterpiece that is the greatest novel in the French language.
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