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Proust, Marcel

Remembrance of Things Past, [56] 18; [57] 60; [58] 52

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20180601165125 Anthony Wells, Proust - Slightly Foxed Issue 58

Marcel

Anthony Wells on Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past

Stretching over seven books and amounting to more than 3,000 pages, Proust’s novel opens with the narrator remembering times when, as a boy, he stayed with his parents, his grandmother and their housekeeper, Françoise, in his great-aunt’s house in the village of Combray. We are not told at any stage what age this boy is, nor what he is called. We are plunged only into the boy’s mind and feelings . . .
20180301125229 Marcel Proust, Anthony Wells on Remembrance of Things Past

High Society, Low Life

Anthony Wells on Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past

Marcel Proust’s novel Remembrance of Things Past begins, as I discussed in an earlier piece (SF no. 56), with the narrator recalling the times he spent as a boy in his great-aunt’s house in the village of Combray. There were two walks the family regularly took from the house, one in the direction of a property owned by a family friend, M. Swann, and the other in the direction of an estate owned by a very grand aristocratic family with local connections, the Guermantes. The Way by Swann’s, the first walk, is the name of the first book of Proust’s novel. The Guermantes Way, the second walk, is the name of the third, and with it the narrator and reader enter a new world, of dukes and duchesses, princes and princesses, and all the high society of Paris’s fashionable Faubourg Saint-Germain.
20171201152501 Anthony Wells on Proust, Remembrance of Things Past - Slightly Foxed Issue 56

Introducing M. Swann

Anthony Wells on Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past

The first time my wife-to-be invited me round for a meal, and sat me down in her book-lined dining-room, my eye was caught by three thick volumes in a slipcase, in decorative blue, white and red dust- wrappers, bearing the name ‘Marcel Proust’ in large black letters at the top of each spine. ‘You’ve read Proust!’ I burst out, thrilled to be able to add to the array of charms with which she had already dazzled me that of having read the incomparable Remembrance of Things Past.

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