Search results for ""Author Marcel Proust""

'A la Recherche du Temps Perdu' by Marcel Proust is a magnificent and towering achievement of French literature, published in English translation in twelve volumes between 1922 and 1931, and totalling nearly one and a half million words. It is difficult for many readers to find the time and motivation needed to keep going through to the end as Proust has a rich and sometimes discursive style. However, a powerful structure underlies the whole work which is not revealed till the last chapter. This selection, which is less than a quarter of the original, includes all the crucial characters, places and themes needed to understand this and omits everything else. It is not intended to improve the original novels by editing, as many wonderful passages and descriptions have been left out. The style of the book in its vocabulary and sentence structure is unaltered. Nothing is paraphrased or condensed. The text reads as a continuous lively narrative with much of Proust's wit and humour and follows the sequence of the original, showing the development of all the major characters and including all the incidents which are referred to in the closing passages which resolve the whole novel. Proust himself encouraged the publication of "selected passages showing a coherent whole which is not diffused and will make one want to read the whole book" and this is the aim of this selection. It is intended to inspire the reader to go to the full text and enjoy individual sections in the knowledge of where they fit into the whole.

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The definitive translation of a truly great French novel - Proust's beautiful, atmospheric story of memory and loss.This is the first volume of In Search of Lost Time, one of the greatest French novels of the twentieth century. Travelling back through time, the narrator tells the story of events long since past - his childhood happiness and sadness, and memories brought famously back to life by the taste of a madeleine. His family's friend and neighbour, the aristocratic Swann, weaves through the tale. We learn of Swann's passionate love affair with Odette, a jealous love that creates a model for the narrator's own relationships. All Proust's great themes begin here: time and memory, love and loss, art and the artistic vocation.THE ACCLAIMED FULLY REVISED EDITION OF THE SCOTT MONCRIEFF AND KILMARTIN TRANSLATIONThe best translation available: 'A really major, significant achievement, and one that you should put on your Christmas list immediately' GuardianVINTAGE FRENCH CLASSICS - six masterpieces of French fiction in collectable editions.

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With its sweeping digressions into the past and reflections on the nature of memory, Proust’s oceanic novel In Search of Lost Time looms over twentieth-century literature as one of the greatest, yet most endlessly challenging, literary experiences. Influencing writers like Virginia Woolf and James Joyce, and even anticipating Albert Einstein in its philosophical explorations of space and time, In Search of Lost Time is a monumental achievement and reading it is a rite of passage for any serious lover of literature. Now, in what renowned translator Arthur Goldhammer says might be “likened to a piano reduction of an orchestral score,” the French illustrator Stéphane Heuet re-presents Proust in graphic form for anyone who has always dreamed of reading him but was put off by the sheer magnitude of the undertaking. This New York Times best-selling graphic adaptation reveals the fundamental architecture of Proust’s work while displaying a remarkable fidelity to his language as well as the novel’s themes of time, art, and the elusiveness of memory. As Goldhammer writes in his introduction, “The reader new to Proust must attend closely, even in this compressed rendering, to the novel’s circling rhythms and abrupt cross-cuts between different places and times. But this necessary attentiveness is abetted and facilitated by the compactness of the graphic format.” In this first volume, Swann’s Way, the narrator Marcel, an aspiring writer, recalls his childhood when—in a now-immortal moment in literature—the taste of a madeleine cake dipped in tea unleashes a torrent of memories about his family’s country home in the town of Combray. Here, Heuet and Goldhammer use Proust’s own famously rich and labyrinthine sentences and discerning observations to render Combray like never before. From the water lilies of the Vivonne to the steeple and stained glass of the town church, Proust’s language provides the blueprint for Heuet’s illustrations. Heuet and Goldhammer also capture Proust’s humor, wit, and sometimes scathing portrayals of Combray’s many memorable inhabitants, like the lovelorn Charles Swann and the object of his affection and torment, Odette de Crécy; Swann’s daughter, Gilberte; local aristocrat the Duchesse de Guermantes; the narrator’s uncle Adolphe; and the hypochondriac Aunt Léonie. Including a Proust family tree, a glossary of terms, and a map of Paris, this graphic adaptation is a surprising and useful companion piece to Proust’s masterpiece for both the initiated and those seeking an introduction.

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Presented for the first time in English, the recently discovered early manuscripts of the twentieth century’s most towering literary figure offer uncanny glimpses of his emerging genius and the creation of his masterpiece.One of the most significant literary events of the century, the discovery of manuscript pages containing early drafts of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time put an end to a decades-long search for the Proustian grail. The Paris publisher Bernard de Fallois claimed to have viewed the folios, but doubts about their existence emerged when none appeared in the Proust manuscripts bequeathed to the Bibliothèque Nationale in 1962. The texts had in fact been hidden among Fallois’s private papers, where they were found upon his death in 2018. The Seventy-Five Folios and Other Unpublished Manuscripts presents these folios here for the first time in English, along with seventeen other brief unpublished texts. Extensive commentary and notes by the Proust scholar Nathalie Mauriac Dyer offer insightful critical analysis.Characterized by Fallois as the “precious guide” to understanding Proust’s masterpiece, the folios contain early versions of six episodes included in the novel. Readers glimpse what Proust’s biographer Jean-Yves Tadié describes as the “sacred moment” when the great work burst forth for the first time. The folios reveal the autobiographical extent of Proust’s writing, with traces of his family life scattered throughout. Before the existence of Charles Swann, for example, we find a narrator named Marcel, a testament to what one scholar has called “the gradual transformation of lived experience into (auto)fiction in Proust’s elaboration of the novel.”Like a painter’s sketches and a composer’s holographs, Proust’s folios tell a story of artistic evolution. A “dream of a book, a book of a dream,” Fallois called them. Here is a literary magnum opus finding its final form.

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The definitive translation of one of the greatest French novels of the twentieth centuryIn the opening volume of Proust's great novel, the narrator travels backwards in time in order to tell the story of a love affair that had taken place before his own birth. Swann's jealous love for Odette provides a prophetic model of the narrator's own relationships. All Proust's great themes - time and memory, love and loss, art and the artistic vocation - are here in kernel form.'Surely the greatest novelist of the 20th century' Telegraph

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THE ACCLAIMED FULLY REVISED EDITION OF THE SCOTT MONCRIEFF AND KILMARTIN TRANSLATIONIn The Guermantes Way Proust's narrator recalls his initiation into the dazzling world of Parisian high society. Looking back over his time in the glamorous salons of the aristocracy, he satirises this shallow world and his own youthful infatuation with it. His observations, and his experiences with his lover Albertine, also educate him in the volatile nature of desire as he walks the path towards adulthood.

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THE ACCLAIMED FULLY REVISED EDITION OF THE SCOTT MONCRIEFF AND KILMARTIN TRANSLATIONIn Sodom and Gomorrah Proust's narrator not only depicts the class tensions of a changing France at the beginning of the twentieth century but also exposes the decadence of aristocratic Parisian society and muses upon the subjects of homosexuality and sexual jealousy.

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THE ACCLAIMED FULLY REVISED EDITION OF THE SCOTT MONCRIEFF AND KILMARTIN TRANSLATIONIn the two novels - The Captive and The Fugitive - contained in this volume, Proust's narrator is living in his mother's apartment in Paris with his lover, Albertine. However, this is far from an idyllic state of affairs. His obsessive love for her means that their relationship is shadowed by jealousy and headed for tragedy.

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