/r/Proust
"May you always see a blue sky overhead, my young friend; and then, even when the time comes, which is coming now for me, when the woods are all black, when night is fast falling, you will be able to console yourself, as I am doing, by looking up to the sky.” - Marcel Proust.
A place to read and discuss about the works and life of the author Marcel Proust.
You might also want to try /r/literature, /r/books, and searching Proust on reddit.
/r/Proust
Which smell, taste, touch, sound or piece of music trigers the strongest recollection for you ? (Or a view ? – perhaps more difficult)
For my part, a good example would be the signature tune (by Vangelis) of a radio boadcast my mother used to listen regularlry when I was a small kid : it always brings me back right there. Same with the smell of fresh paint, which always resurect the time when my parents repainted our house.
But definitly, I would say music is a solid provider of involuntary memories (see Vinteuil's sonata). Many records have that effect on me, although I must say that the more you listen to them, the more the reminiscence fades (we should listen with moderation those precious tunes!)
So what are your best remembrance of things past ?
Who else is giving their kids a lot of tea and french pastry so they can form the deep important childhood memories needed to fully comprehend Proust?? My youngest (4) has been on this strict diet for
I am on The Guermantes Way. Be gentle with spoilers.
Did the lives of Proust and Ravel ever overlap? Born four years apart, lived in Paris—you figure they must have, especially given Proust's interest in music. I know he loved Fauré and Franck, to name two other French composers (and of course there's Hahn), but I've not come across anything about Ravel. Mentions in the Tadié and Carter biographies are tangential at best, which makes me think the answer is no.
If not, then how about the Narrator and Ravel? I haven't missed anything in the novel so far, have I?
!The narrator's grandmother has just died.!<Does anyone have any sort of encouragement about future happenings in the novel? I would like to know when the narrator will move on from this obsession with the aristocracy. Sodom and Gomorrah is enigmatic and at the same time not subtle at all. I will try to keep going but the labyrinthine Belle Epoque musings I am absorbing only with some difficulty.
I had been reading Swann's Way earlier in the semester for fun through the centenary edition Moncrieff translation but stopped at the beginning of Combray since I got busy with university stuff. I checked this edition out through my uni's library and forgot much of it by this point so I think I might just restart Swann's Way from the beginning, maybe buy myself a copy at home. Point is, what do y'all recommend for me to continue reading? I read a short excerpt from the new oxford world's classics edition and it seemed a bit easier to read, but I don't know if not having the slightly more obtuse prose(at least for my silly brain) from the Moncrieff translation makes me lose anything. I'm sure any edition will be deeply insightful, and I will definitely have more chances to read different editions at some point later in my life, but I want to hear your recommendations. Thanks!
Finished ISOLT after 16 months. I found the climax>!of Gilberte presenting (procuring) her 16 year old daughter for Marcel hilarious and creepy. I know this is a somewhat uncharitable reading, but come on, Marcel (around 40 at this point) tells Gilberte he wants to only hang out with 'young girls in flower,' to shower them with presents and get a chaste kiss from them in return. Pretty weird lol.!<
Reading the whole thing was a wonderful life experience of course
27 May 2025, according to Amazon. The item page includes this blurb:
Marcel Proust’s monumental seven-volume In Search of Lost Time is considered by many to be the greatest novel of the twentieth century. In Time Regained, the final volume, edited and annotated by noted Proust scholar William C. Carter, Proust brilliantly resolves the novel’s main themes: love and jealousy, grief and oblivion, time and memory, and the purpose of art and literature. Among the famous passages is the “masked ball” in which the Narrator, after a long absence from society, attends a party at the Prince de Guermantes’s and at first fails to recognize his old acquaintances because of the changes wrought by the passage of time. The concluding pages, in which the Narrator recovers his will and discovers the subject matter of his future book, contain many observations about life and art that will remain in our memories.
For Time Regained, Carter uses the translation by Andreas Mayor, a successor to the translations of the previous volumes by Charles Kenneth Scott Moncrieff, who died before finishing this volume.
Hi, I am not sure this is the right place as we seem to have a majority of English readers, but I am still trying. I would like to read La Recherche. In french as I am French. I imagine that having a good critical commentary helps appreciate the text. The default choice therefore would be La Pléiade. Alas, I love to read on my e-ink and I can't find any digital edition of La Pléiade. Folio has the same text but I assume not the same commentary. Any solution to my problem? I am afraid not but you never know...
was rereading the montcrief translation this morning and came upon this exchange between Swann and Odette. How ridiculous! I laughed out loud. I created a reddit account and wanted to share it.
"He smiled and went on: "Just as you like. It doesn't really matter, but it's a pity that you can't give me the name. If I were able to form an idea of the person it would prevent my ever thinking of her again. I say it for your sake, because then I shouldn't bother you any more about it. It's so calming to be able to form a clear picture of things in one's mind. What is really terrible is what one can't imagine. But you've been so sweet to me; I don't want to tire you. I do thank you with all my heart for all the good you've done me. I've quite finished now. Only one word more: How long ago?"
To which Odette responds, "Oh, Charles, can't you see you're killing me?" p. 519
I'm sure there's a connection between this and the later bouts with Albertine. I also cannot help but wonder whether 'can't you see you're killing me' is purposeful.
Hello everyone, I am looking for a definitive list or playlist of all the music referenced in “In Search of Lost Time”, if possible with a reference to the passage the pieces come from, in a similar way to the Visual Companion of Paintings
I’m halfway through Swann’s Way so when looking through Spotify at various “Proust and Music” playlists, I can’t tell whether these are actually referenced in the book(/s) or if they are pieces which are just meant to evoke the mood of Proust’s writing
Any help would be much appreciated! Thank you :)
If there is something that irtitates me about the Recherche is how so many important things are mentioned in passing or even subordinate clauses, like characters dying or Msr. de Charlus molesting a nine year old boy. Saniette being bullied by Monsieur Verdurin so much that He has a stroke resulting in His death afterwards left me devastated and it was mentioned in a footnote!
But then, Proust seemed to be self aware of this If you think of the Duchess of Guermantes' reaction when Swann laconically tells her that He is terminally ill and she is absolutely distraught and irritated by her husband skimming over it as If it's nothing. She is a kindred Spirit for the Reader in that moment but it only happens once in the entire novel.
Hi all,
I’m reading for the first time. I’m loving Swann’s Way so far. I’m reading the Lydia Davis translation and really enjoying it. I like how close she hews to his words.
If that’s what I enjoy, which translations do you recommend for the subsequent volumes?
I’ve been reflecting on a passage from Le Temps Retrouvé and noticed a potential issue in the way it has been translated into English.
The original French is as follows:
"Mais, comme Elstir Chardin, on ne peut refaire ce qu’on aime qu’en le renonçant."
Here are two English translations that seem problematic to me:
Stephen Hudson's translation: "As Elstir said of Chardin, one can only recreate what one loves by repudiating it."
Andreas Mayor and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D. J. Enright: "But—as Elstir had found with Chardin—you can make a new version of what you love only by first renouncing it."
In both cases, there seems to be an implication of a 'hierarchical' relationship or direct influence between Elstir and Chardin. However, in the original French, this relationship is not necessarily implied. The phrase "comme Elstir Chardin" could simply mean "like Elstir or Chardin," treating them as two separate examples of artists who embody the same principle of renouncing what they love in order to recreate it.
This is how it's interpreted, for exemple in the German translation by Bernd Jürgen Fischer: "Aber man kann, wie Elstir Chardin, das, was man liebt, nur wiedererschaffen, indem man sich von ihm lossagt" and the Spanish translation by Consuelo Berges: "Pero, como Elstir Chardin, sólo renunciando a ello se puede rehacer lo que se ama" (both using the literal form of the original, 'Elstir Chardin' without commas.) or in the Portuguese translation by Lúcia Miguel Pereira: "Mas, como Elstir, como Chardin, sabia que só renunciando ao que se ama consegue-se refazê-lo." ("like Elstir , like Chardin"). In those versions, there are no suggestion of a direct relationship between the two artists—just a comparison of two figures who exemplify the same artistic philosophy.
The italian translation, by Giovanni Raboni, come a little closer to the English ones: "Ma, come Elstir con Chardin, si può rifare ciò che si ama solo rinunciandovi." ("like Elstir with Chardin").
Does anyone else find these English (and Italian) translations misleading? Shouldn’t the English versions be more aligned with the idea that Proust is simply using both Elstir and Chardin as independent examples, rather than suggesting that Elstir learned something from Chardin? Do you have other translations of this passage into English for us to compare?
I'm sorry for the long post and thank you!
I read ISOLT several years ago so my memory is not clear - but there was a quote somewhere that had to do with “ if you look back in time and are not embarrassed about who you were/ or what you did- then you have not grown or changed “. I know I’m butchering it- but does anyone know what I’m talking about? Would love to find it.
Hi guys, I read the Penguin translation of In Search of Lost Time in 2006 and I remember a scene - and I hope I haven’t imagined this - when he is talking about being older and he is on a train next to a young girl and says something like ‘i was so close I could have bitten her. We were millimeters apart but separated by impossibility…’
Could anyone tell me where this is? Or give me the exact quote?
Hopefully it isn’t just my imagination and I would greatly appreciate any help.
I'm listening to the audiobook and the start has a political discussion. Could someone please explain further the context surrounding this? Is there anything of interest I should know about this? Thanks!
In other words, how do you feel he advanced and improved on the psychological and satirical novel type?
Or did he simply switch out God with a agnostic Beauty?
Just some of my thoughts:
As I bid farewell to writing on Proust, I look back to a day in 1962 when I reached his death, and seemed not only to be bereaved but to die myself. A biographer's relationship with his subject is perhaps the deepest in his own experience outside the family, and he who writes more lives than one more deaths than one must die. Further still is the week in 1947 when I first encountered a volume of Proust's letters, found to my astonishment that it revealed a world that belonged to the raw material of his novel, and resolved to write his life with the intention or hope of experiencing it myself, and of discovering what A la Recherche meant to himself. Remotest, but still most vivid of all, is the moment sixty years ago in 1928, when I opened in our midland city public library a blue-and-gold-spined book mysteriously called Swann's Way, and found myself walking with the Narrator, an adolescent of my own age, among the cornfields and appletrees of the Meseglise Way. I have walked there ever since, as so many others have and many more will.
George D. Painter, Introduction to the 1988 edition of his biography on Proust
[The] qualities of non-fiction are useful to remember when we realize how many qualities of fiction the longest of all novels does not possess. It has, for example, no structure worth speaking of, and probably would not have attained to one even if Proust had been given another ten years to work on it. Characters would still have shown up twenty years too young at the last party, or twenty years too old, or simply still alive when they should have been dead. Devotees who say that Á la recherche du temps perdu reminds them of a cathedral should be asked what cathedral they mean. It reminds me of a sandcastle that the tide reached before its obsessed constructor could finish it; but he knew that would happen, or else why build it on a beach?
Clive James, Cultural Amnesia (2007) p578
I read Proust for the first time recently and powered through it in under 4 months. I am not saying this to brag but to emphasise that I didn’t read it slowly and digest every line, more that I read it quite quickly and imagine there was a lot that i didn’t take in.
Four things I’ve noticed about myself after reading Proust…
I seem to write longer sentence now and get a kick out of trying to emulate Proust in work emails - truly insufferable I know.
I am having a lot more Proustian moments in my day to day, so many childhood and teenage memories bubbling up, which is great.
I am able to enjoy the smaller things in life more.
I am noticing my fleeting thoughts and expressing them properly which I think is making me a nicer person…
I’m not saying I’m a completely new and improved person (see point 1) but I was wondering if others found any changes in themselves after reading Proust?
Basiclly I want to read "In search of lost time" ,I've read the first volume and absolutely loved it ,but now I feel preety paranoid over that I will lose something very importrant through translation so I have 3 options:
Continue to read in my native language (polish) in translation of Tadeusz Boy-Żeleński
Start reading it in english translation, though here I also worry about translation and I assume that C. K. Scott Moncrief is better translator than Żeleński but I dont know
Most extreme which probably will not work is to learn French and read original
Thanks for answers in advance and sorry for my questionable english
I am 16 years old
Does anyone know which existing translation of Le temps retrouvé William C. Carter is revising for the Yale edition, or if perhaps he will write a new one himself?
It's an odd question to ask since I'm only on Volume 2. 😉
I am currently rereading Swann's Way for the second time, and find my reading sessions getting shorter every day, needing more breaks, as I try to deal with the evolution of Swann's increasing dependency and his utterly desparate way of interacting with Odette. The intensity of his obsession, his counterproductive way of dealing with it... I truly find him unbearable. It's brilliantly done, it's so frustrating and so relatable at the same time, and that's why it is so triggering probably. But I just want to slap this man in the face. every. single. page.
Have you been completely annoyed with Swann at this stage as well, or does this say more about my personal psychological makeup, some Jungian way of hating in Swann what I cannot accept in myself?
What parts of In Search of Lost Time did you find psychologically confronting / triggering in this way, if any?
So i have just read Bergotte's death scene and it might easily be one of the best things that i have ever read in a book. Such brilliance, such underlying hopefulness. The reception of Vermeer's painting, the reception of the little patch of yellow wall being a masterpiece in its own right, and the best thing: the narrator's thoughts regarding afterlife. This Part of the Recherche is it's own. Little patch of yellow wall. Even though someone dies, it's so uplifting and beautiful.
I was absolutely blown away.
This is a 2022 lecture by Prof. Antoine Compagnon, Professor Emeritus at Le Collège de France. He argues that the best thing about reading is getting lost in a book, getting lost with the author, and then finding your own understanding as you continue reading. As Compagnon says, Proust has become an icon who is now read through the prism of the numerous interpretations that have encrusted À la recherche du temps perdu over the decades; we must decanonize not just Proust's novel but other classical novels as well.
I compared the first page of the older translation, which was on project Gutenberg to the page of the Kindle edition which they’re selling for $49 on Amazon and I couldn’t see any differences at least in the first page. I’m also actually having a problem finding a different translation. I can only find one translation on the first page that uses the phrase the scales from my eyes which seems to be a fairly Archaic expression. Google books also has the same translation for free. If the point of doing a new translation was to modernize the book, its certainly not modernized.