Marcel Proust
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Valentin-Louis-Georges-Eugène-Marcel Proust (July 10, 1871 - November 18, 1922) was a French intellectual, novelist, essayist and critic, best known as the author of In Search of Lost Time (in French À la recherche du temps perdu, also translated previously as Remembrance of Things Past), a monumental work in twentieth-century fiction.
Biography
Proust was born in Auteuil, just outside of Paris, in 1871, the son of bourgeois parents: Achille Adrien Proust, a famous doctor and epidemiologist and Jeanne Clémence Weil the daughter of a rich and cultured Jewish family. Proust was raised Catholic.
Throughout his childhood, he spent every summer in the village of Illiers. Elements of both Auteuil and Illiers would later be fictionalised in his epic novel In Search of Lost Time as the narrator's childhood home town of "Combray". The village of Illiers was renamed Illiers-Combray on the occasion of the Proust centenary celebrations.
At the age of 9, he suffered his first asthma attack, which nearly killed him. Despite his poor health, he served a year as an enlisted man in the French army, stationed at Coligny Caserne in Orléans.)
Proust was a dilettante, an aspiring writer, a social climber, and he was not taken very seriously by his contemporaries. The pivotal change in his life came after the death of his father in 1903 and his mother in 1905. At this time his health began to deteriorate. His curative trips to seaside resorts, most often to Cabourg (Calvados), inspired the fictional town of Balbec.
In 1907 he published an article in Le Figaro called "Sentiments filiaux d'un parricide", in which he focused on two elements that would be central in his later writing: memory and guilt. Other articles which appeared during the period 1907-1908 are considered by many critics to be preliminary to his novel.
Proust spent the last three years of his life virtually confined to his famously cork-lined bedroom, sleeping all day and working feverishly all night to complete his novel.
Proust's In Search of Lost Time (À la recherche du temps perdu, originally translated as Remembrance of Things Past) begun in 1909 and finished just before his death in 1922, is one of the greatest achievements of Western literature.
This novel in seven volumes, spanning some 3,200 pages in English translation, and teeming with more than 2,000 characters, has stirred Graham Greene to say that Proust was the "greatest novelist of the 20th century" and Somerset Maugham to call it the "greatest fiction to date". Proust died before he was able to complete his revision of the drafts and proofs of the last volumes, the last three of which were published posthumously.
Proust's multifaceted vision is enthralling. He was a satirist of the aristocricy and an intense analyst of introspective consciousness. He was the creator of more than forty unforgettable characters who continue to resonate in the world's literary consciousness. Above all, Proust's central message is the affirmation of life. Contrary to the opinion voiced by some of his contemporaries and critics, Proust's great work teaches that life's "purpose" is not to be sought in artistic artifacts: life is not fulfilled when a painting or a novel is completed, but when it is transmuted, in the very course of quotidian living, into something "artistic" or spiritually mature and wise.
Proust's work shows a heavy influence from Tolstoy, evidenced in the views he gives on art, some of the ways in which he models psychology and social interaction, and in certain episodes such as the trip to Venice (cf. Tolstoy's Anna Karenina). In turn, Proust is often compared with German writer Thomas Mann. Regarding writing style, Proust loved the works of John Ruskin, and translated them into French; he read Ruskin's autobiography Praeterita so many times that he almost memorised it. He claimed, also, that In Search of Lost Time was his attempt at writing a French incarnation of The Thousand and One Nights.
Homosexuality is a major theme in the novel, especially in The Guermantes Way and subsequent volumes. Proust himself was homosexual, and had a long-running affair with pianist and composer Reynaldo Hahn. Indeed, it is often easier to understand his fictional creations if one strips off their feminine endings--Albertine, Gilberte, Andrée--and regards these characters instead as young men.
Proust died in 1922 and is buried in the Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris.
In 1995, Penguin undertook a fresh translation of In Search of Lost Time by editor Charles Prendergast and seven translators in three countries, based on the latest and most authoritative French text. Its six volumes were published in Britain under the Allen Lane imprint in 2002. The first four (those which under American copyright law are in the public domain) have since been published in the U.S. under the Viking imprint and in paperback under the Penguin Clasics imprint.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcel_Proust
