Online Encyclopedia
Marcel Proust
Valentin-Louis-Georges-Eugène-Marcel Proust (July 10, 1871 - November 18, 1922) was a French intellectual, novelist, essayist and critic, best known as the author of In Search of Lost Time (À la recherche du temps perdu, also translated previously as Remembrance of Things Past).
Biography
Proust was born in Paris, the son of a famous doctor. His mother was Jewish, his father Roman Catholic; he was raised within a Catholic culture. His father's family was from the Beauce region, around Chartres, and throughout childhood he spent each summer in the village of Illiers. This would later be fictionalized in In Search of Lost Time as "Combray", and the village and the surrounding countryside is described extensively in the first two volumes. The village was renamed Illiers-Combray in honour of this on the occasion of the Proust centenary celebrations.
At the age of 9 he suffered his first asthma attack, which nearly killed him. He became very sickly, and sometimes hypersensitive to light and noise. He spent most of his life in the bed of his Paris apartment because of his asthma and extremely sensitive skin and stomach. His curative trips to seaside resorts, most often Cabourg (Calvados), formed the basis of the fictional town of Balbec.
His principal work is the lengthy In Search of Lost Time. Proust died before he was able to revise the drafts and proofs of the latter books, the last three of which were published posthumously. In "Jean Santeuil", Proust describes his portrait by painter Antonio de La Gandara whom he much admired.
Proust's In Search of Lost Time (À la recherche du temps perdu) is indubitably one of the greatest achievements of Western imaginative literature. This cycle of 7 novels, spanning ca. 3,200 pages and teeming with more than 2,000 characters, has provoked Graham Greene to say that Proust was the greatest novelist of the 20th century and Somerset Maugham to call it the greatest fiction to date. Proust's multifaceted vision is enthralling: he is both a drastic satirist and the nanoscopic analyst of introspective consciousness; a chronicler and theorist of Eros, exploring nuances of human sexuality; and an ethical wisdom writer; crucially, he is the creator of unforgettable major (more than 40) characters who are growing and corroding in the river of Time. But, above all: Proustian central message is the affirmation of life. Contrary to the opinion voiced by his decadent aesthetic contemporaries and critics galore, Proust's great work teaches that life's "purpose" is not to be sought in artistic artefacts: life is not fulfilled when a painting or a novel are left after the curtain had fallen down, but when it is transmuted, in the very course of quotidian living, into something "artistic" or spiritually mature and wise.
Proust's work shows a heavy influence from Tolstoy, evidenced in the views he gives on art, some of the ways in which he models psychology and social interaction, and in certain episodes such as the trip to Venice (cf. Tolstoy's Anna Karenina). In turn, Proust is often compared with German writer Thomas Mann. Homosexuality is a major theme, especially in The Guermantes Way and subsequent books. Proust himself was homosexual, and had a long-running affair with pianist and composer Reynaldo Hahn. Regarding writing style, Proust loved the works of John Ruskin, and translated them into French. He claimed, also, that In Search of Lost Time was his attempt at writing a French incarnation of The Thousand and One Nights.
Proust died in 1922 and is buried in the Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris.
Alexander Woollcott said, "Reading Proust is like bathing in someone else's dirty water."
Alain de Botton's How Proust Can Change Your Life was published in 1997.
Bibliography
- Portraits de femmes
- 1896 Les plaisirs et les jours
- 1913-1927 À la recherche du temps perdu or In Search of Lost Time
- 1919 Pastiches et mélanges
- 1954 Contre Sainte-Beuve
- 1954 Jean Santeuil (unfinished)
External Links
- Why Proust? And Why Now? - an essay on the lasting relevance of Proust and his work
- Project Gutenberg e-texts of works by Marcel Proust
- A short Proust bibliography (bilingual)
- French e-texts
- Proust Society of America
- The Kolb-Proust Archive for Research