Living and Dying with Marcel Proust

A la recherche du temps perdu is a masterpiece of twentieth-century fiction, combining elements from great expectations and lost illusions. It is a feast of sensory and impressionistic tapestry, woven by desire, memory, and responsiveness to tastes, perfumes, sounds, and colors. It also traces the construction of narrative time and a corresponding mode of storytelling, marked by loops, swerves, detours, regressions, and returns.

Format: Hardback
Length: 256 pages
Publication date: 13 January 2022
Publisher: Europa Editions (UK) Ltd

A masterpiece of twentieth-century literature, Marcel Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu is a work that is alive with both appetite and curiosity. The journey it describes, which combines elements from the earlier narratives of great expectations and lost illusions, is distinctively Proustian in its recasting of these elements.

To commemorate the centenary of Marcel Proust's passing, renowned literary scholar Christopher Prendergast explores the journey that unfolds on an arc defined by the polarity of his title, living and dying. His book offers a chapter-by-chapter exploration of the rich sensory and impressionistic tapestry of a lived world, woven by the pulse of desire, the hauntings of memory, and an ever-alert responsiveness to tastes, perfumes, sounds, and colors. It also traces the construction of a unique architecture of narrative time and a corresponding mode of storytelling, marked by all manner of loops, swerves, detours, regressions, and returns, from the macro level of the novels plot to the micro level of the famously elaborate Proustian sentence.

The lives of Proust's characters, both major and minor, are shown as criss-crossing and converging in ways that often take the reader by surprise, before descending the arc on an irreversible trajectory of decline, as the body starts to fail and the grave beckons.

Weight: 354g
Dimension: 349 x 147 x 28 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781787703513