The Complete Short Stories of Marcel Proust

by Joachim Neugroschel (Translator), Roger Shattuck (Introduction)

Overview

One of the great literary figures of the modern age, French novelist Marcel Proust (1871-1922) probes the precarious mental and erotic nuances of love, the frail mysteries of time passing and time past in highly original, surprising tales. Includes a new translation of the complete text of Pleasures and Days, Proust's only short-story collection, and six tales previously uncollected and never before available in English.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780815412649
Publisher:	Lyons
Publication date:	06/18/2003
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	224
Product dimensions:	7.04(w) x 8.96(h) x 0.75(d)

About the Author

The author is the winner of three PEN translation awards and the French-American translation prize. He has translated over 180 books, including works by such authors as Franz Kafka, Thomas Mann, Paul Celan and Albert Schweizer. He lives in Queens, New York.

Editorial Reviews

All the fiction Proust (1871–1922) wrote, in addition to his autobiographical Jean Santeuil and his great seven-volume Remembrance of Things Past, is collected in this attractive volume, which contains the text of his first book, Pleasures and Days (1896), with a few semifictional journalistic sketches added, and six previously untranslated "early stories." The latter are mostly dated ephemera devoid of narrative tension ("The Indifferent Man" being a partial exception). The former, though self-indulgent and uneven, do comprise a winning composite portrait of early–20th-century Parisian street, salon, and bedroom scenes—ranging from the Balzacian melodrama of "Confessions of a Young Girl" to the agreeably jaded rhythms of "The Melancholy Summer of Madame de Breyven" (which one can imagine Colette enjoying). Critic Roger Shattuck's claim (in his Foreword) that these sketches stand to Proust's masterpiece in somewhat the same relation as does Joyce's Dubliners to his Ulysses won't convince anybody. But readers who adore the mature Proust won't want to miss them.

Kirkus Reviews