In Search of Lost Time

About Marcel Proust

Marcel Proust was born in Auteuil in 1871. In his twenties, he became a conspicuous society figure, frequenting the most fashionable Paris salons of the day. From 1907, however, he rarely emerged from a cork-lined room in his apartment on the Boulevard Hausman. He slept by day and worked by night, writing letters and devoting himself to the completion of A la Réchèrche du Temps Perdu. He died in 1922 before the publication of the last three volumes of his great work.

Praise

“Twice amended to bring it to documentary decorum and the kind of textual completion Proust himself could never achieve, the C. K. Scott Moncrieff translation of the Search, buffed, rebuffed, lightened, tightened, and in the abstergent sense, brightened, constitutes a monument which is also a medium—the medium by which to gain access to the book, the books, even the apocrypha of modern scripture. A triumph of tone, of a single (and singular) vision, this ultimate revision of the primary version affords the surest sled over the ice fields as well as the most sinuous surfboard over the breakers of Proustian prose, an invaluable and inescapable text.” —Richard Howard