In Search of Lost Time (complete 3 volume set)

Proust, Marcel (Translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff & Terence Kilmartin)

ISBN 10: 0701124776 / ISBN 13: 9780701124779

Published by Chatto & Windus, London, 1982

About this Item

1982. Second impression of the 1981 3 volume edition. Translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff & Terence Kilmartin. This is the three volume collection of Proust's extended novel In Search Of Lost Time. Publisher's light blue cloth with gilt titles and decoration to the spines. Light soiling to edges but overall the books are in very good plus condition with no inscriptions. The unclipped dust jackets have the Enid Marx design. Jacket of the first volume is creased and is a little loose. The jackets of vols 2&3 are both in excellent condition. PLEASE NOTE: Heavy set so extra will be needed for shipping to non-UK customers.

Seller Inventory # hLitProust05

Bibliographic Details

• Title: In Search of Lost Time (complete 3 volume set)
• Publisher: Chatto & Windus, London
• Publication Date: 1982
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0701124776
• ISBN 13: 9780701124779
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: Reprint
• Condition: Very Good
• Dust Jacket Condition: Good Plus - Very Good
• Seller catalogs:
  • Literature

About this title

Synopsis

Swann's Way tells two related stories, the first of which revolves around Marcel, a younger version of the narrator, and his experiences in, and memories of, the French town Combray. Inspired by the "gusts of memory" that rise up within him as he dips a Madeleine into hot tea, the narrator discusses his fear of going to bed at night. He is a creature of habit and dislikes waking up in the middle of the night not knowing where he is.

He claims that people are defined by the objects that surround them and must piece together their identities bit by bit each time they wake up. The young Marcel is so nervous about sleeping alone that he looks forward to his mother's goodnight kisses, but also dreads them as a sign of an impending sleepless night. One night, when Charles Swann, a friend of his grandparents, is visiting, his mother cannot come kiss him goodnight. He stays up until Swann leaves and looks so sad and pitiful that even his disciplinarian father encourages "Mamma" to spend the night in Marcel's room.

Review

Marcel Proust whiled away the first half of his life as a self-conscious aesthete and social climber. The second half he spent in the creation of the mighty roman-fleuve that is Remembrance of Things Past, memorializing his own dandyism and parvenu hijinks even as he revealed their essential hollowness. Proust begins, of course, at the beginning--with the earliest childhood perceptions and sorrows. Then, over several thousand pages, he retraces the course of his own adolescence and adulthood, democratically dividing his experiences among the narrator and a sprawling cast of characters. Who else has ever decanted life into such ornate, knowing, wrought-iron sentences? Who has subjected love to such merciless microscopy, discriminating between the tiniest variations of desire and self-delusion? Who else has produced a grief-stricken record of time's erosion that can also make you laugh for entire pages? The answer to all these questions is: nobody.