num_pages: 512
description: Marcel Proust whiled away the first half of his life as a self-conscious aesthete and social climber. The second half he spent in the creation of the mighty roman-fleuve that is Remembrance of Things Past , memorializing his own dandyism and parvenu hijinks even as he revealed their essential hollowness. Proust begins, of course, at the beginning--with the earliest childhood perceptions and sorrows. Then, over several thousand pages, he retraces the course of his own adolescence and adulthood, democratically dividing his experiences among the narrator and a sprawling cast of characters. Who else has ever decanted life into such ornate, knowing, wrought-iron sentences? Who has subjected love to such merciless microscopy, discriminating between the tiniest variations of desire and self-delusion? Who else has produced a grief-stricken record of time's erosion that can also make you laugh for entire pages? The answer to all these questions nobody.
language: English
title: Dormant: in Search of Lost Time:La Prisonniere/La Fugitive and Le Temps Retrouve: Volumes 5 and 6
titlecomplete: Dormant: in Search of Lost Time:La Prisonniere/La Fugitive and Le Temps Retrouve: Volumes 5 and 6
genres: 20th Century, Philosophy, Cultural, French Literature, Writing, Novels, Literature, Classics, Fiction, France
ratings_count: 905
series: À la recherche du temps perdu
publisher: Allen Lane