Product Description

Time Regained, the final volume of In Search of Lost Time, begins in the bleak and uncertain years of World War I. Years later, after the war’s end, Proust’s narrator returns to Paris and reflects on time, reality, jealousy, artistic creation, and the raw material of literature—his past life. This Modern Library edition also includes the indispensable Guide to Proust, compiled by Terence Kilmartin and revised by Joanna Kilmartin.

For this authoritative English-language edition, D. J. Enright has revised the late Terence Kilmartin’s acclaimed reworking of C. K. Scott Moncrieff’s translation to take into account the new definitive French editions of Á la recherché du temps perdu (the final volume of these new editions was published by the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade in 1989).

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #158672 in Books
• Published on: 1999-02-16
• Released on: 1999-02-16
• Original language: French
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 784 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780375753121
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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From Library Journal
In The Fugitive, the seventh volume of Proust's classic Remembrance of Things Past, the focus is grief. The plot is superficially simple: Albertine, the narrator's mistress, has left him; he considers his love for her, her reasons for departure, what response(s) he should make, and his life. He makes several attempts to manipulate her return; when it becomes impossible, he mourns and remembers the past. This series is a pseudoautobiographical study of the author's own self-centered, physically restricted, self-reflective life in pre-World War I France. In Time Regained, the final volume, Proust gathers together all the themes of the previous seven. The narrator pays several visits to Paris, during and after the war, observing the military and nonmilitary behaviors of old and new acquaintances. Later, he is shocked to recognize that they and he have become old. Finally, his thoughts turn to former events, old loves, and reliving his experiences through writing. The author is known for his complicated thought patterns and recurring, interwoven themes. Unfortunately, both the abridgment and the format compound these textual difficulties. There is likely to be little demand for this abridged French classic in translation, unless it is made into a movie. Neville Jason has a beautiful voice and an obvious love for the text. Recommended for large academic and public libraries. I. Pour-El, Iowa State Univ. Lib., Ames
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review
?Proust is perhaps the last great historian of the loves.? ?Edmund Wilson -- Review

Review
“Proust is perhaps the last great historian of the loves.” —Edmund Wilson

Customer Reviews

Intimately beautiful in spite of reputation for grandeur.
Alright, so I'm a cheat. I never thought I'd get beyond admiring the bright spanking six volumes of A la recherche (3700 pages! Phew!) on my bookshelves, but when it was announced that Raul Ruiz had made a film of the last book, I seized my chance. Thanks to this brilliant edition you can, because at the end is an exhaustive guide to Proust, listing every character, historical person, place and theme of the whole work, so that just by referring regularly to this you quickly catch up with what's going on. Of course this isn't the same as living with characters and events through literature, but this volume is so amazing you can't fail to want to begin the whole thing and experience them from the start.

This is, as I expected, one of the most beautiful and exciting books I have ever read, as well as one of the most frustrating and irritating. What is most surprising, for a book claimed as one of the two greatest of the century, is how old-fashioned it is (compared to the still startlingly modern and socially relevant ULYSSES).

It has two types of narrative. One, about a young middle class boy who penetrates society, is a mixture of social comedy and tortured romance familiar to anyone who has read a great Victorian novel - there is the same social analysis of an outmoded caste, wide range of characters, poetic evocation of place.

The language, once you get used to the involved, elaborate sentences, is very accessible in a Jamesian kind of way, intricately psychological and analytical, yet supremely elegant and radiant, with a verve and lightness remarkable for such a heavy book.

The translation is, for once, remarkable - it can never be the original, I guess, but you rarely feel that you are getting only half the work like you usually do.

The second half is less satisfactory. As is appropriate to a book concerned with time, the book's forward progress is constantly impeded, by degressions, flashbacks, fastforwards, explanations. The book, like those of Anthony Powell (if you loved THE DANCE TO THE MUSIC OF TIME, you'll adore this) is less straight plotting, than a series of monumental set-pieces.

This novel is 450 pages long, but has only about three events - the narrator going back to the country to stay with friends; the first world war; a huge party. These are mini-novels in themselves and are extraordinary as social observation, character comedy and amusing incident, as well as profoundly moving meditations on the inexorable power of history and old age.

Imagine the narrator has a remote control as he is walking through the film of his life. He freezes the screen every three seconds and discusses in detail the tableaux vivants before him, bending time and experience back and forwards with ease as he does so.

In between these are ruminations on the art of writing. This is a remarkably self-reflexive book, the narrator suddenly starts talking about how he came to write it, what he intended to achieve and what tools he was going to use. The volume becomes less the conclusion of a vast work than the record of its inception; you have to go back then and read it again (believe me, 3700 pages won't seem enough).

This section, a book-length manifesto, is fascinating and thrilling, but also repetitive, difficult, frustrating, and sometimes obscure - it gets in the way of the brilliant descriptive passages - the meeting with Baron de Charlus is possibly the most extraordinary thing I have read, until the remarkable coup of the closing party, where people the narrator hasn't seen for years have grown horribly old and form a grotesque, funereal fancy dress party - you want him to shut up talking about Time and impressionism and get back to the fun.

Two other things: Evelyn Waugh was wrong - Proust is hilarious, both with subtle ironies and more obvious satiric abuse; with risible character traits and wider social events.

Secondly, the narrator is not some unbearable omnisicient know-all as those of Victorian novels - he is deeply unreliable - a prig, hypocrite, voyeur, homophobic, intolerant, puritan, snob, deeply contradictory and cripplingly ill; in earlier volumes he is apparently obsessional, jealous and brutal to the point of insanity. No wonder Nabokov adored him - he is, in his ravishingly aesthetic unreliability, the first Humbert.

A novel for all Time
In this final life's work of Proust on the theme of the passage of Time it's clear that the author is riper, near to death and concerned about the lasting impact of his writing. "Eternal duration is promised no more to men's works than to men." Yet there is so much beauty and substance and lyricism in his 4,300 pages clearly his volumes are, both individually and collectively, a masterwork for the ages. The novel seems more like an autobiography in which the names of persons and places have been changed to protect the innocent (and the gulity). Because of his theme, Marcel constantly returns to the events of his life to gain some semblance of understanding of them. In this volume he is concerned with the effect of the world war upon Paris. The familiar characters of Gilberte and Bloch happily emerge again to center stage and, as always, Charlus and Morel. Because of his failing health and self-exile from society, he must have known that he had little Time to tie up all the loose ends and that another volume would not be in the offing after this one. Indeed, he never lived to see this volume in print. By virtue of his failing health the pressing nature of his last years lend a poignancy to the themes of this volume so that it stands out among the other works when Time was full of budding possibilities and had not ultimately become a dreaded adversary. In this volume Proust picks up the leitmotifs that thread their way through this remarkable tapestry in his walks down various ways and he brings them all to a meaningful end. The story lines are surprisingly simple and easy to follow and there is so much enduring value in his masterfully articulated "impressions." I decided to commit Time a few months ago to read all of Proust's work --it was Time well spent. I can't encourage you enough to make a similar investment. The work is truly a Timeless masterpiece from one of the real geniuses of his day and through it Proust has justly earned his immortality, his worthy prominence among the best literary minds of all Time.

Literary peerlessness
"Time Regained" is a dark ending to the "In Search of Lost Time" cycle, as Proust, sickly like his fictional narrator, unknowingly nears the end of his own life but senses its imminence. France, like the most of the rest of the world, is now a very different place. The Dreyfus affair is receding into the past under the shadow of the new war that has descended upon Europe, with Germany having ravaged Belgium and threatening to destroy London and Paris.

Many of the people with whom Marcel has associated throughout his life and whom we came to know so intimately through the pages of his chronicle are now dead, whether by disease, accident, old age, or the war. Those among the living include the Baron de Charlus, who sympathizes with the Germans and frequents a hotel that serves as a male brothel; Bloch, who has de-Judaicized his name and has assumed an English chic; and Odette and her daughter Gilberte, the latter now herself a mother, who have not so gracefully weathered the effects of aging.

Marcel himself is now an adult of at least middle age, and, as far as he is concerned, still no closer to achieving his goal of becoming a writer as he was in his youth. He has, however, started writing articles and comes to realize, as he reflects on the course of his life, that the intricate web of contacts he has made can serve as grist for his literary mill, should he decide in his waning days to take up a pen and make some contribution to letters. And, of course, over the past four thousand pages that is exactly what his author has done. Marcel muses on Time (capitalization intended), memory, and dreams as necessary elements in the creation of art, a product of so much personal pain and suffering that death can seem like a welcome reprieve.

Judging the novel as a whole now that I've finished all six volumes, I affirm that there is nothing like it, or even close to it, in literature; like "Moby Dick" or "Don Quixote" it resides in its own impenetrable legendary world of oneness. In my review of "Swann's Way," I compared Proust to Henry James, but I see now that I was way off the mark. James writes like he's throwing his weight around, imperiously demanding intellectual respect and forcing his reader into submission with his intentionally inscrutable compositions; Proust's prose, conversely, calmly and warmly invites the reader into Marcel's society and caresses him with the most delicate sensations and deepest emotions. Proust is closer to Henry Adams than he is to Henry James, but even this attempted juxtaposition is buffered by a wide margin.

Proust's style is so ornate that it is the most difficult of any writer's to describe, yet paradoxically there is nothing affected about it; he is quite possibly the most unpretentious writer in literature. He never tries to impress the reader with his erudition, even though he evidently has much, or make himself out to be something he's not; one gets the sense that what he writes is exactly what and how he thinks, as incredible as that seems. He uses humor without trying to be a comedian, sorrow without trying to be a tragedian. He is employing language simply to illustrate life and the world, and I think language has no higher calling than that.