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Summary
Summary
The long-awaited fifth volume--representing "the very summit of Proust's art" ( Slate )--in the acclaimed Penguin translation of "the greatest literary work of the twentieth century" ( The New York Times )
A Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition, with flaps and deckle-edged paper
Carol Clark's acclaimed translation of The Prisoner introduces a new generation of American readers to the literary riches of Marcel Proust . The fifth volume in Penguin Classics' superb new edition of In Search of Lost Time --the first completely new translation of Proust's masterpiece since the 1920s--brings us a more comic and lucid prose than readers of English have previously been able to enjoy.
The titular "prisoner" is Albertine, the tall, dark orphan with whom Marcel had fallen in love at the end of Sodom and Gomorrah (volume 4). Albertine has moved in with Marcel in his family's apartment in Paris, where the pair have a seemingly limitless supply of money and are chaperoned only by Marcel's judgmental family servant, Françoise. Marcel, who worries obsessively about Albertine's relationships with other women, grows more and more irrational in his attempts to control her, keeping her prisoner in his apartment and buying her couture gowns, furs, and jewelry in an attempt to protect her from herself and from the outside world and. And yet in addition to being a tragedy of possessive love, The Prisoner is also a comedy of human folly and misunderstanding, linked to the other volumes of the larger novel through its themes of class differences, art, irrationality, social snobbery, and, of course, time and memory.
For more than seventy-five years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 2,000 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
Author Notes
Proust is one of the seminal figures in modern literature, matched only in stature by Joyce, Woolf, Mann and Kafka. By the last decade of the 19th century, the charming and ambitious Proust, born into a wealthy bourgeois family, was already a famous Paris socialite who attended the most fashionable salons of the day. The death of his parents in the early years of the 20th century, coupled with his own increasingly ill health, made of Proust a recluse who confined himself to his cork-lined bedroom on the Boulevard Haussmann. There he concentrated on the composition of his great masterpiece, Remembrance of Things Past (1913-27). In recent years, it was discovered that he had already prepared a first draft of the work in the 1890s in Jean Santeuil, which was only published posthumously in 1952.
Remembrance of Things Past resists summary. Seeming at turns to be fiction, autobiography, and essay, Remembrance is a vast meditation on the relationship between time, memory, and art. In it the narrator, who bears the same first name as the author, attempts to reconstruct his life from early childhood to middle age. In the process, he surveys French society at the turn of the century and describes the eventual decline of the aristocracy in the face of the rising middle class. The process of reconstruction of Marcel's past life is made possible by the psychological device of involuntary memory; according to this theory, all of our past lies hidden within us only to be rediscovered and brought to the surface by some unexpected sense perception. In the final volume of the work, the narrator, who has succeeded in recapturing his past, resolves to preserve it through the Work of Art, his novel.
He died of pneumonia and a pulmonary abscess in 1922. He was buried in the Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris. (Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (2)
Kirkus Review
American edition of the "new," non-Moncrieff translation of Proust's posthumous novel, a story and a metastory alike that are full of tangles.Copyright snags kept the British retranslation of The Prisoner from appearing in the U.S. for a full 16 years after being published in the U.K., but that's only the beginning of a minor saga. Famously neurasthenic and agoraphobic, Proust died before this book appeared, and it hadn't been part of the original plan for what became the six-volume In Search of Lost Time in any event. Had he been alive, writes translator Clark, "the book would have been considerably different from the one we have now." She only begins to suggest those differences, but one wonders whether the already shrouded relationship Proust describes between his narrator, in many respects a stand-in for himself, and the rough-edged orphan Albertine might have been obscured even further, for while there is sex, there is no union and no clear reason why Albertine should have come to live with the narrator and his mother in the first place, Mama having perhaps been made nervous at the thought "that by expressing any reservations about the girl to whom I said I was going to become engaged, she might cast a shadow over my future lifeperhaps lead me to reproach myself, once she was gone, for having hurt her by marrying Albertine." It's all very mysterious, for Albertine comes and goes, as do other characters who figure in the saga, such as M. de Charlus and the Duchesse de Guermantes; yet, each is there at exactly the right time. Proust, sharp-eyed and thinly veiled, writes here of the widespread acceptance of anti-Semitism and nationalism, there of sexual desire and its discontents ("It is the homosexuality that survives in spite of obstacles, condemned, covered in shame, that is the real homosexuality"), and always, always, of his Garbo-esque desire to be left alone.A classic work of early modernist literature given new life, thereby to fuel a new conversation about the book and its author in a decidedly different world. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
From perhaps the greatest writer of the 20th century, Proust's masterpiece, A la recherche du temps perdu (sometimes translated literally if unpoetically In Search of Lost Time), was first translated into English in the 1920s and, with only minor exceptions, not translated again until the present time. The publisher has undertaken to update the long-standing work of translators C.K. Scott Moncrieff, Terence Kilmartin, and Andreas Mayor by engaging a different translator for each of the seven volumes that this immense novel comprises (see, e.g., Swann's Way, translated by Christopher Prendergast). Here, Proust focuses on Albertine, one of the narrator's great loves, whom he sequesters in his parents' apartment, separating her from what he imagines to be society's pernicious influences and making her the prisoner of the title. In keeping with the publisher's mission, the late Clark (French, Oxford Univ.) has rendered this fifth volume into English with a contemporary flavor. Though published in the UK in 2002, this new translation was kept from publication here until now by U.S. copyright issues. Verdict Though some readers may prefer the flow and sound of the earlier work and find certain changes gratuitous, this work will be of considerable interest to readers who enjoy great literature, whether they wish to compare to previous translations or are discovering Proust for their time.-Edward B. Cone, New York © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
From early morning, with my face still turned to the wall and before I had seen, above the tall window curtains, the color of the line of morning light, I already knew what kind of day it was. I could tell from the first street noises, whether they reached me muffled and distorted by dampness or twanging like arrows in the empty, resonant space of a wide-open morning, icy and pure. The rumbling of the first tram told me whether it was huddled against the rain or forging gaily toward a blue horizon. And maybe even those sounds had been preceded by some swifter, more penetrating emanation which had slid into my sleep and suffused it with a sadness foretelling snow, or had found there a certain little intermittent figure which it set to singing so many rousing hymns in praise of the sun that, though still asleep, I would begin to smile, my closed eyes preparing to be dazzled, until a crash of music finally brought me awake. It was, in fact, mainly from my bedroom that I perceived the world around me at this period. I know Bloch spread the story that when he came to see me in the evening, he would hear the sound of conversation; since my mother was at Combray and he never found anyone in my room, he concluded that I was talking to myself. When, much later, he found out that Albertine had been living with me then and realized that I had been hiding her from everyone, he declared that he understood at last why, at that time in my life, I never wanted to go out. He was wrong. Very understandably so, since reality, even if it is inevitable, is not completely predictable; those who learn some correct detail about the life of another promptly jump from it to quite incorrect conclusions and see in the newly discovered fact the explanation for things which in truth are completely unrelated to it. When I think now of how my friend had left Balbec with me and come back to Paris to live under the same roof, giving up her idea of going on a cruise; of how she slept twenty paces from my bedroom, at the end of the corridor, in my father's little room with the tapestries, and how every evening, very late, before leaving me to sleep, she would slip her tongue into my mouth like my daily bread, like a nourishing food having the almost sacred character of all flesh on which suffering--the suffering that we have endured for its sake--has conferred a kind of spiritual sweetness, then the analogy which springs to my mind is not the night which Captain de Borodino allowed me to spend at the barracks-a favor which, after all, cured a mere passing malaise--but that other night when my father sent Mama to sleep in the little bed next to mine. So true is it that life, if it decides once more to spare us a trial which seems inevitable, does so in a different manner--such a contradictory manner, sometimes, that it appears almost sacrilegious to recognize that the grace granted to us is the same! Once Albertine had learned from Françoise that, in the darkness of my room with its still-closed curtains, I was not sleeping, she did not bother to avoid making a small amount of noise as she washed in her bathroom. So then I would often go into another bathroom adjoining hers, which was a pleasant place. In former times a theatrical producer would spend hundreds of thousands of francs to stud with real emeralds the throne from which the diva would play the part of an empress. The Russian Ballet has taught us that simple, well-directed lighting effects can flood the stage with jewels just as sumptuous and more varied. This new décor, already more immaterial, is still not so charming as the one which the eight o'clock sun produces in place of what we were accustomed to see when we did not rise until midday. The windows of our two bathrooms were not clear but, so that we could not be seen from outside, were all puckered into an old-fashioned, artificial frost effect. The sun suddenly turned this net of glass to yellow, gilded it and, gently uncovering in me a young man of former times who had been long hidden by habit, intoxicated me with memories, as if I had been in the open air looking at gilded foliage in which not even the presence of a bird was wanting. For I could hear Albertine endlessly whistling: Sorrows are crazy And listening to them is crazier still. I was too fond of her not to smile happily at her bad musical taste. Mme Bontemps, I may say, had had a passion for that song the previous summer, until she heard that it was a silly thing, whereupon, instead of asking Albertine to sing it when people called, she began to ask for: A farewell song rises from troubled springs which in turn became "that old thing of Massenet's that the child is always trotting out." A cloud would pass, hiding the sun, and I would see the modest foliage of the glass curtain turn dull and lapse into a grisaille. Albertine's bathroom was just like mine but, since there was another at the other end of the apartment, Mama had never used this one for fear of disturbing me with noise. The walls separating the two were so thin that we could chat to each other as we washed, carrying on a conversation interrupted only by the sound of the water, in the kind of intimacy which is often produced in hotels by the cramped space and nearness of the rooms, but which in Paris is so rare. At other times, I stayed in bed, dreaming for as long as I liked, for the orders were never to come into my room until I had rung. Because of the inconvenient way in which the bell-push had been hung over my bed, reaching it took so long that sometimes, tiring of the effort to grasp it and enjoying being alone, I almost went back to sleep. Not that I was completely indifferent to Albertine's presence in the family apartment. By separating her from her friends I had succeeded in sparing my heart further suffering. I had placed it in a position of rest, of near immobility which would help it to heal. But the state of calm which my friend's presence produced in me was an alleviation of suffering rather than actual joy. Not that it did not allow me to enjoy many pleasures from which my previous, acute pain had closed me off, but far from owing these pleasures to Albertine, whom I hardly even found pretty any more, in whose company I was bored and whom I had a clear sense of no longer loving, I experienced them, on the contrary, when she was not with me. So I would begin the morning by not having her called at once, especially if the weather were fine. For a few moments, knowing that his company made me happier than hers, I remained in private colloquy with the little inner figure, singer of salutations to the sun, whom I mentioned a moment ago. Of all the persons who make up our individual selves, the most apparent are not the most essential. When illness has eliminated them one by one, there will survive in me a final two or three, the hardest to kill off, and notably one, a philosopher who is happy only when he has discovered, between two works of art or between two sensations, a common factor. But I have sometimes wondered if the last of all will not be the little man very like another little man that the Combray optician kept in his shop window, who took his hood off whenever the sun shone and put it back on again if it was going to rain. I know that little man, with all his egoism; I can be suffering an asthma attack which only the coming of rain would relieve, he does not care and, at the first drops that I have been so longing for, he scowls and crossly pulls up his hood. On the other hand, I feel sure that on my deathbed, when all my other "I's" are already gone, if there is a blink of sun, while I am drawing my last breaths, the little barometer man will be delighted and will take his hood off and sing, "Ah! The sun at last!" I rang for Françoise. I opened the Figaro . I looked for, and once more did not find, an article or something calling itself an article which I had sent to that newspaper and which was nothing but a slightly rearranged version of the recently rediscovered page which I had written in Dr. Percepied's carriage while looking at the steeples of Martinville. Then I read Mama's latest letter. She found it strange, shocking, that an unmarried girl should be living alone with me. It may be that on the first day, when we were leaving Balbec, when she saw me looking so unhappy and was worried about leaving me alone, she had been pleased to hear that Albertine was coming with us and to see loaded on to the train, next to our luggage (the luggage I had spent the night weeping over in the hotel in Balbec), Albertine's narrow black boxes, which had seemed to me to have the shape of coffins, so that I did not know whether they would bring life into our house, or death. But I did not even think about Mama's feelings, being entirely caught up in the joy of that radiant morning and the thought that, after all my fear of staying in Balbec, I was taking Albertine home with me. Mama may not have been hostile to the scheme at first (she spoke kindly to my friend, as a mother does whose son has been seriously wounded and who is grateful to the young mistress who is devotedly nursing him), but she became so as it was too thoroughly carried out, and as the young woman's stay in our house--in our house in the absence of my parents--became prolonged. I cannot say, however, that she ever made her hostility plain to me. Just as before, when she felt she could no longer reproach me with my nervous disposition, my laziness, now she was afraid--something I perhaps did not entirely understand at the time or did not wish to understand--that by expressing any reservations about the girl to whom I said I was going to become engaged, she might cast a shadow over my future life, make me less committed to my wife, perhaps lead me to reproach myself, once she was gone, for having hurt her by marrying Albertine. Mama preferred to seem to endorse a choice that she felt she would not be able to make me reconsider. But everyone who saw her at that time told me that her sorrow at having lost her own mother was aggravated by a look of perpetual worry. This mental strain, this constant argument with herself, made Mama's temples over-heat, and she was constantly opening windows to try to cool down. But she could not take a decision for fear of "influencing" me in the wrong direction and spoiling what she thought was my happiness. She could not even make up her mind to stop me having Albertine in the apartment in the meantime. She did not want to appear more strict than Mme Bontemps, whose place it was, if anyone's, to act, and who did not find the arrangement unsuitable, much to my mother's surprise. In any case she was sorry to have been obliged to leave the two of us together by having to set off just then for Combray, where she saw she might have to stay (and did indeed stay) for many months, during which time my great-aunt needed her by her day and night. Everything there was made easy for her by the kindness, the devotion of Legrandin, for whom nothing was too much trouble, who put off from week to week his return to Paris, simply because my aunt, whom he did not know particularly well, had been a friend of his mother's, and because he realized that the dying woman valued his attentions and could not do without him. Snobbery is a serious malady of the soul, but a localized one which does not affect it overall. I, on the other hand, was delighted by Mama's absence in Combray, for it meant that Albertine (whom I could not ask to conceal it) would not be able to mention to her her friendship with Mlle Vinteuil. This relationship would, in my mother's eyes, have utterly precluded not only a marriage, which she had in any case asked me not to discuss in too definite terms with my friend and which furthermore was coming to seem intolerable to me, but even a stay in our house by Albertine as a guest. Failing such a serious reason, of which she was not aware, Mama, under the double effect of her mother's edifying and liberating example on the one hand (Grandmother, that admirer of George Sand, who defined virtue as nobility of heart) and on the other my own corrupting influence, now showed tolerance for women of whose conduct she would once have been severely critical and whom she would have condemned even now if they had been middle-class friends of hers from Paris or Combray, but whose great souls I praised to her and whom she forgave much because they were fond of me. In spite of everything, and even setting aside the question of propriety, I think Albertine would have exhausted Mama's patience, for Mama had learned at Combray, from Aunt LZonie and from all her female relations, habits of order of which my friend had not the slightest inkling. She would no more have closed a door nor, on the other hand, hesitated to enter a room where the door was open than would a dog or a cat. Her somewhat inconvenient charm consisted in being in the house not in the manner of a young girl but of a domestic animal which comes into a room, goes out, turns up in the place you least expect it, jumps on to the bed-I found this deeply restful-lies down beside one, makes a place for itself and lies there without moving, without annoying one as a person would. However, she finally adapted herself to my sleeping hours and learned, not just not to try to come into my room, but even not to make any noise until I rang. It was Franoise who set these rules for her. Françoise was one of those Combray servants who know their master's importance, and that the least they can do is to make everyone show him the respect they think is his due. When a visitor from outside gave Françoise a tip to be shared with the kitchen-maid, the donor hardly had time to hand over his coin before Françoise, with equal speed, discretion and energy, had primed the girl to appear and thank him, not under her breath but loudly and clearly, as Françoise had told her was the right way to do. The curé of Combray was not a genius, but he too knew how things should be done. Under his instruction, the daughter of some Protestant cousins of Mme Sazerat's had been converted to Catholicism, and the family had shown him all due appreciation. There was a question of her marrying a nobleman from Méséglise. The young man's parents wrote asking for information about her, a rather disdainful letter in which they showed contempt for her Protestant birth. The priest replied in such terms that the nobleman had to swallow his pride and write a very different letter, begging as the most precious favor to be allowed to form an alliance with the young lady. Excerpted from The Prisoner: In Search of Lost Time, Volume 5 (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition) by Marcel Proust All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
