Combray

Combray

تأليف : Marcel Proust

النوعية : الفكر والثقافة العامة

حفظ تقييم

Combray by Marcel Proust..A guide to "Combray," the opening section of Proust's "A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu." This text helps students to encounter in context the highlights of the book that have so often been anthologized: the madeleine dipped in the narrator's tear - the quintessential Proustian experience of affective memory - the scene of the goodnight kiss, the appearance of Swann, the evocation of the little town, the old servant, Francoise, and the charming landscapes.

Suitable for both undergraduates and the general reader, an introduction clarifies the historical background to this masterpiece of French literature. It examines the ways in which the complexities of biography, literary transformation and the structural importance of its many themes may be approached and appreciated. The text is supported by full explanatory notes and frequent translations.

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.