In Search of Lost Time
A life recovered through memory that arrives unbidden, and a jealousy that outlives the person it was about.
The memory of a particular image is but regret for a particular moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fugitive, alas, as the years.
Across seven volumes published between 1913 and 1927, an unnamed narrator reconstructs a whole existence from the inside, moving between Combray childhood, the salons of Paris, and the long attachments that shape his life. The account proceeds by accretion rather than plot, letting a taste, a paving stone, or a phrase of music open onto material the narrator had thought closed.
For a clinician, the work is a sustained study of how the past is revised rather than retrieved. Swann's absorption in Odette, and later the narrator's surveillance of Albertine, show possessiveness feeding on absence and detail, needing no cooperation from its object to continue. Grief for the grandmother reaches the narrator late and in fragments, felt completely only long after the death itself.
Its interest lies less in any single episode than in watching a life reinterpret itself continuously, each remembered scene rewritten by what came after. Publication spanned the author's death in 1922, the closing volumes appearing posthumously.
About the author
Marcel Proust
Marcel Proust was a French novelist, born in 1871 near Paris and died in 1922. He is known for In Search of Lost Time, a novel published in seven volumes between 1913 and 1927, which follows the workings of memory across a life. His pages return often to involuntary memory, the recollections stirred without warning by a taste or a sound, and to jealousy in love. Ill and increasingly withdrawn, he wrote much of the later work in seclusion.
Details
- 1913
- French