Remembrance of Things Past - Part 1
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Publisher Description
Remembrance of Things Past (French: À la recherche du temps perdu) is a novel in seven volumes by Marcel Proust. His most prominent work, it is popularly known for its length and the notion of involuntary memory (cues encountered in everyday life evoke recollections of the past without conscious effort), the most famous example being the "episode of the madeleine" - Throughout the work many similar instances of involuntary memory, triggered by sensory experiences such as sights, sounds and smells conjure important memories for the narrator and sometimes return attention to an earlier episode of the novel.
Part 1 of this edition of the classic translation by C. K. Scott Moncrieff, contains the first 3 volumes of the monumental work:
- Swann's Way
- Within a Budding Grove
- The Guermantes Way
Customer Reviews
CharlieChaplin
For years I attempted Proust and failed. The opening lines of his great work rememberence seemed rambling, recursive with sentences endlessly diverting and qualifying, always wanting to add a layer of detail, a layer of observation. Proust seemed all comas and no full stops. I would put it aside with disgust. Proust was too baroque, too buracratic with his endless sentences.
Then I changed and I saw how ignorant I was. Perhaps because I had children and memory, and my own childhood became all the more vivid.
Those sentences which seemed churning endless and impenetrable became swirling, flowing streams of hypnotic consciousness. The digressions layered and built on each other in the most sensuous vivid and evocative manner. You had a visceral sensual sense of memory. In this sense, Proust is musical, subliminal, he intuited in the most wonderful manner.
Read this book. If you don't like it, keep coming back to it. One day it'll click.