Pleasures and Days: And Other Writings

Front Cover
Doubleday, 1957 - French fiction - 304 pages
A great legend has grown up around Marcel Proust. It is that after years of semi-invalidism and unproductive dilettantism he underwent a sudden, rather miraculous transformation and emerged at thrity-eight as the author of one of the most original and influential novels of our century, the brillant Remembrance of things past. The truth is that during the years preceding the writing of his masterpiece Proust was quietly producing stories and essays which had the arresting vision, humor, and eloquence which his novel finally revealed to a wider public than his own small Parisian coterie. This early miscellany is not merely a "dreaming of works to come" but a series of experiments in various genres--narrative, satire, criticism, prose poetry, and personal essay. Each of these experiments has its own life and validity as well as the additional interest it holds as a foreshadowing of the culmination of Proust's career when all these threads are drawn together in a grand synthesis. -- Back cover.

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Contents

vande Viscount of Sylvania
4
cal Tastes of Bouvard
55
Her Imperial Highness Princesse
164
Copyright

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