In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
In Search of Lost Time, first translated into English as Remembrance of Things Past, and sometimes referred to in French as La Recherche, is a novel in seven volumes by French author Marcel Proust. This early 20th-century work is his most prominent, known both for its length and its theme of involuntary memory. Wikipedia
In Search of Lost Time follows the narrator's recollections of childhood and experiences into adulthood in the late 19th-century and early 20th-century high-society France, while reflecting on the loss of time and lack of meaning in the world. 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 continued to add 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 only in draft form at the death of the author; the publication of these parts was overseen by his brother Robert.
The work was published in France between 1913 and 1927. Proust paid for the publication of the first volume (by the Grasset publishing house) after it had been turned down by leading editors who had been offered the manuscript in longhand. Many of its ideas, motifs and scenes were anticipated in Proust's unfinished novel Jean Santeuil (1896–1899), though the perspective and treatment there are different, and in his unfinished hybrid of philosophical essay and story, Contre Sainte-Beuve (1908–09).
The novel had great influence on twentieth-century literature; some writers have sought to emulate it, others to parody it. For the centenary of the French publication of the novel's first volume, American author Edmund White pronounced In Search of Lost Time "the most respected novel of the twentieth century." Wikipedia
Originally published: 1913
Pages: 4,215
Translators: C. K. Scott Moncrieff; Stephen Hudson; Terence Kilmartin; Lydia Davis; James Grieve
Genre: Modernist
Characters: Charles Swann, Oriane de Guermantes, Prince de Guermantes, Basin, More
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About the Author
.jpg "Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust")
Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust (/pruːst/; French: [maʁsɛl pʁust]; 10 July 1871 – 18 November 1922) was a French novelist, critic, and essayist who wrote the monumental novel In Search of Lost Time (À la recherche du temps perdu; with the previous English title translation of Remembrance of Things Past), originally published in French in seven volumes between 1913 and 1927. He is considered by critics and writers to be one of the most influential authors of the 20th century. Wikipedia
Born: July 10, 1871, Neuilly-Auteuil-Passy, France
Died: November 18, 1922, Paris, France
Parents: Jeanne Weill Proust and Achille Adrien Proust
Siblings: Robert Proust
