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  • Published: 10 January 1997
  • ISBN: 9780099362616
  • Imprint: Vintage Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 832
  • RRP: $22.99

In Search Of Lost Time, Vol 5

The Captive & The Fugitive




The definitive translation of the greatest French novel of the twentieth century

THE ACCLAIMED FULLY REVISED EDITION OF THE SCOTT MONCRIEFF AND KILMARTIN TRANSLATION

In the two novels - The Captive and The Fugitive - contained in this volume, Proust's narrator is living in his mother's apartment in Paris with his lover, Albertine. However, this is far from an idyllic state of affairs. His obsessive love for her means that their relationship is shadowed by jealousy and headed for tragedy.

  • Published: 10 January 1997
  • ISBN: 9780099362616
  • Imprint: Vintage Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 832
  • RRP: $22.99

About the author

Marcel Proust

Marcel Proust was born in Auteuil in 1871. In his twenties he became a conspicuous society figure, frequenting the most fashionable Paris salons of the day. After 1899, however, his suffering from chronic asthma, the death of his parents and his growing disillusionment with humanity caused him to lead an increasingly retired life. He slept by day and worked by night, writing letters and devoting himself to the completion of A la recherche du temps perdu. He died in 1922 before publication of the last three volumes of his great work.

Marcel Proust was born in Auteuil in 1871. His father, an eminent Professor of Medicine, was Roman Catholic and his mother was Jewish, factors that were to play an important role in his life and work. He was a brilliant, very literary schoolboy, and later a half-hearted student of law and political science. In his twenties he became an assiduous society figure, frequenting the most fashionable Paris salons of the day. During this period he published a volume of sketches and stories, Les Plaisirs et le jours, and between 1895 and 1900 wrote a novel, Jean Santeuil, which was in many ways a first draft for his masterpiece À la recherche du temps perdu. After 1899 his chronic asthma, the death of his parents and his growing impatience with society caused him to lead an increasingly retired life.

In the early 1900s he produced celebrated literary pastiches and translations of Ruskin, The Bible of Amiens and Sesame and Lilies and it was during this period that he wrote Contre Sainte-Beuve, although it was not published until 1954. From 1907, he rarely emerged from a sound-proofed room in his apartment on the Boulevard Hausmann in Paris, in order to insulate himself against the distractions of city life as well as the effect of the trees and flowers which he loved but which brought on his attacks of asthma. He slept by day and worked by night, writing letters and devoting himself to the completion of À la recherche du temps perdu. He died in 1922 before the publication of the last three books of his great work. With À la recherche du temps perdu Proust attempted the perfect rendering of life in art, of the past recreated through memory. It is both a portrait of the artist and a discovery of the aesthetic by which the portrait is painted, and it was to have an immense influence on the literature of the twentieth century.

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Praise for In Search Of Lost Time, Vol 5

Oh if I could write like that!

Virginia Woolf

One of the cornerstones of the Western literary canon

The Times

Proust sinks deepest in readers because the book is so exhaustively analytical, so ceaselessly truthful... The experience of reading [the book] becomes, in itself, an unforgettable thing

Independent

The way he replicates the workings of the mind changed the art of novel-writing forever...his style is extraordinary, enveloping, captivating

Guardian

There are many who swear the experience has permanently enriched their lives

Daily Mail

Surely the greatest novelist of the 20th century

Sunday Telegraph