Mirages and Mad Beliefs: Proust the Skeptic

Description

Marcel Proust was long the object of a cult in which the main point of reading his great novel In Search of Lost Time was to find, with its narrator, a redemptive epiphany in a pastry and a cup of lime-blossom tea. We now live in less confident times, in ways that place great strain on the assumptions and beliefs that made those earlier readings po

Christopher Prendergast is professor emeritus of French at the University of Cambridge, and a fellow of King's College and the British Academy. He is the general editor of the Penguin translation of "In Search of Lost Time".

"[A] deliciously rich interrogation of the French novelist's oeuvre... Prendergast has baked a millefeuille of a book here, crisp, rich and multilayered. Read it for its exposition of jokes, of magic, enchantment and spectrality, of the Proustian body (a place 'where we live but not where we are at home'), as well as for its awkward questions. Refusing to treat Proust as a celebrant, this book interrogates his gloriously mad project, while also amply fulfilling its intention to 'stay alert, with one of the most alert minds of modern literature.'"--Mary Bryden, Times Higher Education