Marcel Proust

:"Proust" redirects here. If you are looking for another person named Proust, see Proust (disambiguation).

À la recherche du temps perdu

Begun in 1909 and finished just before his death, In Search of Lost Time consists of seven volumes, spanning some 3,200 pages in English translation, and teeming with more than 2,000 characters. Graham Greene called Proust the "greatest novelist of the 20th century," and Somerset Maugham called the novel the "greatest fiction to date." Proust died before he was able to complete his revision of the drafts and proofs of the last volumes, the last three of which were published posthumously and edited by his brother, Robert.

Related Topics:
In Search of Lost Time - Graham Greene - Somerset Maugham

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Proust's multifaceted vision is generally considered by critics and readers alike to be enthralling. He was a satirist of the aristocracy, a theorist of the various aspects of love, and an intense analyst of introspective consciousness. He was the creator of more than forty unforgettable characters who continue to resonate in the world's literary consciousness. Above all, Proust's central message is the affirmation of life. Contrary to the opinion voiced by some of his contemporaries and critics, Proust's great work teaches that life's "purpose" is not to be sought in artistic artifacts: life is not fulfilled when a painting or a novel is completed, but when it is transmuted, in the very course of quotidian living, into something "artistic" or spiritually mature and wise.

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Proust's work shows a heavy influence from Tolstoy, evidenced in the views he gives on art, some of the ways in which he models psychology and social interaction, and in certain episodes such as the trip to Venice (cf. Tolstoy's Anna Karenina). In turn, Proust is often compared with German writer Thomas Mann. He claimed, also, that In Search of Lost Time was his attempt at writing a French incarnation of The Thousand and One Nights.

Related Topics:
Tolstoy - Art - Venice - Thomas Mann - The Thousand and One Nights

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Homosexuality is a major theme in the novel, especially in The Guermantes Way and subsequent volumes. Proust himself was homosexual, and is supposed to have had a long-running affair with pianist and composer Reynaldo Hahn. In 1949 the critic Justin O'Brien published an article in the PMLA called "Albertine the Ambiguous: Notes on Proust's Transposition of Sexes" which proposed that some female characters are best understood as actually referring to young men. Strip off the feminine ending of the names of the Narrator's loves--Albertine, Gilberte, Andrée--and one has their masculine counterpart. This theory has become known as the "transposition of sexes theory" in Proust criticism, which in turn has been challenged in Epistemology of the Closet (1991) by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick.

Related Topics:
Homosexual - Reynaldo Hahn - Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

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In 1995, Penguin undertook a fresh translation of In Search of Lost Time by editor Christopher Prendergast and seven translators in three countries, based on the latest and most authoritative French text. Its six volumes were published in Britain under the Allen Lane imprint in 2002. The first four (those which under American copyright law are in the public domain) have since been published in the U.S. under the Viking imprint and in paperback under the Penguin Classics imprint.

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