Remembrance of Things Past, Volume 2

Marcel Proust

Wordsworth Editions, 2006 - France - 1294 pages

Translated from the French by C.K. Scott Moncrieff. With an Introduction by Ingrid Wassenaar. Marcel Proust (1871-1922) spent the last fourteen years of his life writing A la recherche du temps perdu. It is an intimate epic, an excavation of the self and a comedy of manners by turns and all at once. Proust is the twentieth century Dante, presenting us with a unique, unsettling picture of ourselves as jealous lovers and unmitigated snobs, frittering our lives away, with only the hope of ar and a possible salvation. He offers us a form of redemption for a sober and secular age. Scott Moncrieff's delightful translation was for many years the only access to Proust in English. A labour of love that took him nearly as many years as Proust spent writing the original, Moncrieff's translation strives to capture the extraordinary blend of muscular analysis with poetic reverie that typifies Proust's style. It remains a justly famous classic of translation. Originally published in seven parts, Wordsworth Editions are unique in offering the complete work in two volumes. Please note, this book is in Crown Quarto format, and therefore has a higher price than the rest of the World Literature series at $29.95 AUTHOR: Marcel Proust (1871-1922) is generally considered the greatest French novelist of the twentieth century. His reputation derives almost exclusively from the importance of his multi-volume novel 'Remembrance of Things Past'. His novel is founded on his powers of meticulous recollection and his ability to shape those memories into an account of one man's search for his past.

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Contents

• CITIES OF THE PLAIN: 7
• Chapter One: 41
• THE CAPTIVE: 449
• TWO The Verdurins quarrel with M de Charlus: 605
• THREE Flight of Albertine: 714
• THREE Venice: 959
• FOUR A fresh fight upon Robert de SaintLoup: 983

About the author

Proust is one of the seminal figures in modern literature, matched only in stature by Joyce, Woolf, Mann and Kafka. By the last decade of the 19th century, the charming and ambitious Proust, born into a wealthy bourgeois family, was already a famous Paris socialite who attended the most fashionable salons of the day. The death of his parents in the early years of the 20th century, coupled with his own increasingly ill health, made of Proust a recluse who confined himself to his cork-lined bedroom on the Boulevard Haussmann. There he concentrated on the composition of his great masterpiece, Remembrance of Things Past (1913-27). In recent years, it was discovered that he had already prepared a first draft of the work in the 1890s in Jean Santeuil, which was only published posthumously in 1952. Remembrance of Things Past resists summary. Seeming at turns to be fiction, autobiography, and essay, Remembrance is a vast meditation on the relationship between time, memory, and art. In it the narrator, who bears the same first name as the author, attempts to reconstruct his life from early childhood to middle age. In the process, he surveys French society at the turn of the century and describes the eventual decline of the aristocracy in the face of the rising middle class. The process of reconstruction of Marcel's past life is made possible by the psychological device of involuntary memory; according to this theory, all of our past lies hidden within us only to be rediscovered and brought to the surface by some unexpected sense perception. In the final volume of the work, the narrator, who has succeeded in recapturing his past, resolves to preserve it through the Work of Art, his novel. He died of pneumonia and a pulmonary abscess in 1922. He was buried in the Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Remembrance of Things Past, Volume 2; Volume 2 of Classics of World Literature Series; Remembrance of Things Past, Charles Kenneth Scott-Moncrieff; WORDSWORTH CLASSICS OF WORLD L; Volume 1 of World Literature S
• Author: Marcel Proust
• Translated by: Charles Kenneth Scott-Moncrieff, Stephen Hudson
• Edition: revised
• Publisher: Wordsworth Editions, 2006
• ISBN: 184022147X, 9781840221473
• Length: 1294 pages