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Marcel Proust
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In Search of Lost Time [volumes 1 to 7] Kindle Edition

by Marcel Proust (Author) Format: Kindle Edition
4.4 out of 5 stars 921
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"‘In Search of Lost Time’ is widely recognized as the major novel of the twentieth century." —Harold Bloom
"At once the last great classic of French epic prose tradition and the towering precursor of the 'nouveau roman’." —Bengt Holmqvist
"Proust so titillates my own desire for expression that I can hardly set out the sentence. Oh if I could write like that!" —Virginia Woolf
"The greatest fiction to date." —W. Somerset Maugham
"Proust is the greatest novelist of the 20th century." —Graham Greene

On the surface a traditional "Bildungsroman" describing the narrator’s journey of self-discovery, this huge and complex book is also a panoramic and richly comic portrait of France in the author’s lifetime, and a profound meditation on the nature of art, love, time, memory and death. But for most readers it is the characters of the novel who loom the largest: Swann and Odette, Monsieur de Charlus, Morel, the Duchesse de Guermantes, Françoise, Saint-Loup and so many others — Giants, as the author calls them, immersed in Time.
"In Search of Lost Time" is a novel in seven volumes. 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 kept adding 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 in draft form at the death of the author; the publication of these parts was overseen by his brother Robert.
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  5. Publication date
    10 April 2024
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  • ASIN ‏ : ‎ B07QC72MTB
  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ KTHTK (10 April 2024)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • File size ‏ : ‎ 4558 KB
  • Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
  • Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
  • Print length ‏ : ‎ 3723 pages
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.4 out of 5 stars 921

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Marcel Proust

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Top reviews from Australia

Elrond
5.0 out of 5 stars A Great Classic
Reviewed in Australia on 4 February 2016
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Marcel Proust is a marvellous story teller, his words weave a rich tapestry which keeps you turning the pages. Highly recommended.
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BrenDon
1.0 out of 5 stars No doubt written not only at a different time but ...
Reviewed in Australia on 11 December 2014
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No doubt written not only at a different time but at an entirely different pace. it seemed to me that Proust needed about ten pages to make a point. I battled through several chapters before capitulating. Of course scholars of classical literature would have a different opinion.
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JG
5.0 out of 5 stars HOW TO READ THIS BOOK
Reviewed in the United States on 20 March 2023
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How to read this book. It's a very complex book, but how you read it depends on simple choices...

First if you don't like complex historical language and scenery and activities with tons of dialogue... Don't waste your time.

Second, understand that the Narrator has two modes. Your appetite for these modes will vary.

Mode 1. Narration of landscapes, people, and events, with fine detail of settings, language, and behaviors. The narrator sees things that few see, and these observations are usually timeless. If you like European history at the gut level of people from servants to royalty, “fiction” written by an eyewitness who was a keen observer, this is close to being there.

Mode 2. Analysis. The narrator goes deep. Very deep. Then in subordinate clauses, he goes deeper. The language is exceedingly complex. To get the full richness you may have to read some paragraphs a couple of times. Proust was obsessed with trying to explain Why.

He was an observational scientist using contemporary literature, philosophy, history, linguistics, religion, psychology, natural and physical sciences, medicine and other bodies of knowledge for analytical frameworks.

To appreciate this approach, I took a break from this book and read Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises. Hemingway was reacting to writers like Proust. His style is as different as he could make it.

Hemingway's writing is like an artist sketching in India ink. It is laconic, terse, achingly beautiful. The writing will evoke all sorts of reactions and feelings. The events can be quite disturbing. But Hemingway is an artist. He shows, but he does not explain Why. He won't help you process. He does not teach.

Proust the scientist, on the other hand, reflects on what just happened. He ties it to the past, and he hints about the future. dives down into human culture and behavior. Then he goes up to the big picture. Then he dives down again. If you like this kind of analysis, you may occasionally realize you have stopped breathing as you are reading. It is that good. If you don't like this kind of analysis, you will be asleep.

Mode 2 analysis goes on for many pages, to say the least. You just have to choose what you're interested in. For instance If classical music is an interest, Proust may give you a lot to think about from a time when classical music was simply music.

Not so interested in flowers? Just skim and skip forward to the next section of Mode 1 where there is some interesting action! It's okay. Really. It's your book and your time.

And don't worry about taking a break. You might come back, you might not. The few people who know about Prust will be impressed that you read any of it.

Side note...

One oddity is how the master analyzer often declines to analyze himself. For example, the narrator attempts to assault a woman in a dark alley, laughs it off, and within a few pages is psychoanalyzing some Duke or Baron. WTF Marcel, over?

He alludes to fighting duels; no details or analysis. As a teenager he consorts with prostitutes, crying on their bosoms about his (pathological?) obsession with Gilberte who pretty clearly begins to worry about her safety. No analysis. Well, dozens of pages of analysis but you have to wonder whether the narrator ever looks in the mirror to see the source of so many problems. Control freak? Just a bit.

Maybe some of this will be explained in the second half of the book. But on the other hand reading this kind of literature helps us to appreciate both the acuity and the blind spots of previous ages. The control and subjugation of women is everywhere. The anti-Semitism is quite disturbing, especially given what is about to happen in the 20th century. This combination of brilliance and blindness is not unusual. Most of the great feminists and democratizers of the British 1800’s (Dickens, etc.) used racist and anti-Semitic stereotypes in casual dialogue and especially for villains.

Great narrative literature written by eyewitnesses puts us right there in a front row seat but with the perspective of hindsight. What aspects of our current culture will be as cringe-inducing to future generations?
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1.0 out of 5 stars Capa Enganosa
Reviewed in Brazil on 1 June 2021
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O conteúdo deste e-book não é o que podemos ver na capa. Ao invés de conter a saga "In Search of Lost Time", de Marcel Proust, o que de fato há no livro são as obras completas de Virginia Woolf.
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Mitchell Martin
5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars
Reviewed in Canada on 17 November 2016
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Long winded but good.
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Peter Jordan
5.0 out of 5 stars Matter and memory
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 31 August 2017
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More readers begin Proust’s great novel than finish it. Was he afraid this would be so? Having found his Truth, he had related his search for it not in an abstract, schematic way but as he had lived that search, groping after the truth, and labouring under misapprehensions. These would finally be dispelled in 'Time Regained', whose title indicates the unifying theme of the whole work. But that volume and two of its predecessors would come out only after his death. Many of the novel’s first readers were bewildered by it. He himself felt they must think it an autobiography, consisting mainly of digressions. And he was anxious to explain that it was a novel constructed so carefully—though on too large a scale for his design to be grasped all at once—that every part got its meaning from its place in the whole, and the last chapter of the last volume was composed straight after the first chapter of the first volume.
In the ‘Overture’, uncertain, on waking, where he is, the narrator thinks he is staying at his friend Mme de Saint-Loup’s country house, Tansonville, from where he goes for walks in the evening along moonlit roads on which as a child he used to play in the sunshine. And the novel proper begins with a long account of those childhood days, ‘Combray’, days brought back to him by a chance memory when, after dipping a morsel of cake in a spoonful of tea, he recognizes the taste of the crumb of madeleine (a kind of pastry) soaked in her lime-flower tea which he used to be given on Sunday mornings in Combray by his aunt. It was memories of this sort that had provided Proust with his essential subject, deliverance from time. In those moments when time was restored by a sensation at once past and present, like the taste of the madeleine, a ‘self outside time’ seemed to experience ‘reality itself’, like a ‘taste of eternity’.
That is, it seemed so to the narrator in his book; in his correspondence Proust was a sceptic, so even if to know a reality other than this life and this world, a transcendent reality, is possible, whether Proust had done so is doubtful. Still the truth about what he had experienced then wasn’t important for the construction of his novel. As a principle of construction, the theme of involuntary memories, with their message that the past could be recovered, to be preserved in a work of art, was well suited to a book whose matter was the writer’s past life.
‘Swann’s way’ or the ‘Guermantes way’—holidaying in Combray the narrator and his family go one way or the other on their walks. (Swann is the name of some neighbours there, Guermantes that of their goal on the other walk and of the local great folk.) And it is one afternoon when they have gone ‘Swann’s way’ that Marcel sees for the first time, beyond the hawthorn hedge of her father’s park, the little girl who is to become that Mme de Saint-Loup, Gilberte Swann. When the last volume opens he is recalling again his stay at Tansonville and his room there from which he could make out, through the park greenery, the steeple of Combray church—the visible form of a distance of miles and years. The boy has grown into a man and become intimate with the Guermantes, indeed the closest friend of that scion of the Guermantes, Robert de Saint-Loup, whom he got to know at a little place on the Channel coast, Balbec (a subject of his daydreams in Paris), and whom Gilberte has married. The two ‘ways’ have met. And before the novel ends, Marcel is to discover at last why the taste of the madeleine had given him joy, a discovery which confirms him in his vocation as a writer. The message of the involuntary memories has finally been understood, ‘the vast structure of recollection’ is complete.
Then has that matter been given a definite form, an over-arching unity? Musical analysts have attributed an arch-form or bow-form to Wagner’s 'Ring', yet they themselves couldn’t actually hear this in it. Proust likened his own themes to leitmotifs that one can’t know to be such on hearing them first. He also likened his great work to a cathedral. New readers may feel it has the form of a wood that can’t be seen for the trees. But what does form matter in a novel? The circular narrative is in itself a source of aesthetic pleasure, and for the author had the advantage that it could be extended. 'Swann’s Way' came out in 1913 as the first part of a trilogy, but the Great War supervening before 'The Guermantes Way' and 'Time Regained' could follow, the novel went on growing and dividing. 'The Guermantes Way' became the third part, after 'Within a Budding Grove' or ‘love at the seaside’. The theme of sexual inversion was developed—chiefly through the personage of the Baron de Charlus—in 'Cities of the Plain'. Marcel’s jealous love for a new character, Albertine (now introduced retrospectively in the Balbec of the Budding Grove), produced two further parts, 'The Captive' and 'The Sweet Cheat Gone'. Finally, between the visit to Tansonville and a last party at the Princesse de Guermantes’, the War itself entered 'Time Regained', where too the ‘Opinions and pleasures of M. de Charlus’ completed the portrait of Saint-Loup’s mad, grand, disdainful and degraded uncle.
What makes 'Remembrance of Things Past' the novel of novels is its character as a sustained meditation on a life, but this comes at a price. The grandeur of Wagner’s music in 'The Ring' can’t always prevent us from feeling the lack, which Wagner acknowledged, of any very fast music. And reflections haven’t the quality of notations; the special excellence of 'Jean Santeuil', the early study for Proust’s masterpiece, is that except for the contrived and literary prologue, it was all written as it was lived, so that the reworked episodes in the later novel seem by comparison overwritten. It isn’t so with 'Time Regained' though. For one thing this volume is the most unfinished, but the positive reason is that in ‘Paris during the War’ we have a whole chapter written as it was lived, and this alone makes it impossible to regret that the novel in three parts was superseded.
The narrator had returned to Paris then after many years in a sanatorium, and in the last chapter has returned from another after many years more. As one of the guests at an afternoon party given by the Princesse de Guermantes, he at last resolves to begin the book he has long wanted to write—a book in which he will describe people as ‘occupying a place in the dimension of time’. This is just what Proust’s twelve volumes have done in linking with the changing scenes of Marcel’s life these members—changed now so drastically themselves—of a society shaken up by the War. And such a scene as this at the Guermantes’s is unforgettable, but it’s a question how successful is that ‘psychology in time’. It does accord with Proust’s conception of the self. To Pascal the self was hateful, Hugo had celebrated his self, Rimbaud’s was alienated; Proust ingeniously abolished the self by multiplying it—so here we have read about past selves, successive selves, new selves, spare selves, ‘one of my selves’. The Proustian hero recording how he had ceased to love this woman or that seemed modern enough after all those Romantic heroes lamenting having ceased to be loved, and the more so for Proust’s formulation—‘the “I” that had loved her having ceased to exist’. Without continuity of self, though, can there be consistency of character?
The chief fruit of this psychology as applied to the narrator himself is an analysis of ‘les intermittences du cœur’ (the phrase was to have been the work’s general title)—oblivions experienced by him notably in regard to his grandmother and then to that character whose story contributed most to spoiling the three-part balance. Having fallen for his chauffeur-secretary Albert Agostinelli, Proust had been multiplying his observations on possessive love; the young man’s flight and death prompted a comprehensive study of passion, loss and grief. And Gomorrah here makes a pendant to Sodom, but can we believe that Albertine is a young woman? Reading ‘Swann in Love’ we may have wondered at the insertion of this third-person story, told by an omniscient narrator, into Marcel’s story about himself: Swann was to have been the hero of 'Within a Budding Grove' if not of the whole work. Reading about Albertine we may wonder to find jealousy anatomized at greater length still, and the theme of the heart’s intermissions treated all over again, in a ‘Marcel in Love’.
Of course, as well as with that of the illusory self, this theme is naturally bound up with that of involuntary memories. And Proust’s great work is exceptional among novels in the degree to which memory supplies the matter. The signs of his substituting memory for imagination are in fact so many and obvious, it may be asked why he didn’t choose rather—what was plainly in his power—to write a greater 'Praeterita' or even a prose 'Prelude'. But it’s just because he has fictionized his own life, and his personages are not invented, that if you sometimes doubt whether fiction can satisfy mature minds, and feel there is more profit in reading biographies and autobiographies, you may well prefer this novelist to any other. Owing to the vast span of the narrative, the depth of the analysis and the minuteness of the explanations, to the very qualities which may have seemed excessive or even exasperating, you may feel, if you have read so far, that all the people in Marcel’s thoughts at the end, the dead ones and the past selves of his fellow guests disguised by age, have been acquaintances of yours too, and that memory is now showing them to you—familiar and yet distant like those places whose names, Balbec, Combray, Tansonville, are now as evocative for you as for him—in the perspective of your own lifetime.
(Full review on reviewer’s website. And see  In Search of Lost Time: Finding Time Again: Finding Time Again v. 6 (Penguin Modern Classics) .)
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Yashi Sinha
1.0 out of 5 stars One Star
Reviewed in India on 5 October 2017
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Gave up after touching 5 to 10 perecent of the book.
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