Time Regained by Marcel Proust

About the book

In the two novels - The Captive and The Fugitive - contained in this volume, Proust's narrator is living in his mother's apartment in Paris with his lover, Albertine. However, this is far from an idyllic state of affairs. His obsessive love for her means that their relationship is shadowed by jealousy and headed for tragedy.

Review

Oh if I could write like that! -- Virginia Woolf

One of the cornerstones of the Western literary canon ― The Times

Proust sinks deepest in readers because the book is so exhaustively analytical, so ceaselessly truthful... The experience of reading [the book] becomes, in itself, an unforgettable thing ― Independent

The way he replicates the workings of the mind changed the art of novel-writing forever...his style is extraordinary, enveloping, captivating ― Guardian

There are many who swear the experience has permanently enriched their lives ― Daily Mail

About the Author

Marcel Proust

French novelist, best known for his 3000 page masterpiece À la recherche du temps perdu (Remembrance of Things Past or In Search of Lost Time), a pseudo-autobiographical novel told mostly in a stream-of-consciousness style.

Born in the first year of the Third Republic, the young Marcel, like his narrator, was a delicate child from a bourgeois family. He was active in Parisian high society during the 80s and 90s, welcomed in the most fashionable and exclusive salons of his day. However, his position there was also one of an outsider, due to his Jewishness and homosexuality. Towards the end of 1890s Proust began to withdraw more and more from society, and although he was never entirely reclusive, as is sometimes made out, he lapsed more completely into his lifelong tendency to sleep during the day and work at night. He was also plagued with severe asthma, which had troubled him intermittently since childhood, and a terror of his own death, especially in case it should come before his novel had been completed. The first volume, after some difficulty finding a publisher, came out in 1913, and Proust continued to work with an almost inhuman dedication on his masterpiece right up until his death in 1922, at the age of 51.

Today he is widely recognised as one of the greatest authors of the 20th Century, and À la recherche du temps perdu as one of the most dazzling and significant works of literature to be written in modern times.