Remembrance of Things Past, Volume 1 - Within a Budding Grove - Softcover

Proust, Marcel

3.84

157 ratings by Goodreads

9781561633241: Remembrance of Things Past, Volume 1 - Within a Budding Grove

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1561633240 ISBN 13: 9781561633241

Publisher: NBM Publishing, 2002

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Proust, now a teenager, describes his first separation from his mother, a vacation taken in a high class beach resort in Normandy. Besides the fleeting visions of young girls, he also keenly observes, without acidity but detached amusement, the petty sophistry of the French upper class in its genteel environs, safely removed from the lower ones. An important social question is to know whether the pane of glass will always protect the feast of the marvelous beasts and if the obscure people peering at them through the night will not come and pick them out of their aquarium and eat them.”

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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.

From the Back Cover:

“As close to being a definitive English version of the great novel as we are likely to get...This new edition will serve to introduce new generations of readers to what Somerset Maugham rightly described as the greatest novel of our century.” –Allan Massie, Scotsman

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