Alla ricerca del tempo perduto- à la recherche du temps perdu / In search of lost time
“>
Autor:
V. L. G. E. Marcel Proust
Country:
Italy (IT)
Book Theme:
European writers “without borders”
Publisher:
Einaudi
Publishing Year:
2017
Marcel Proust was born on July 10, 1871, in Auteuil, a suburb of Paris, France. His parents, Dr. Adrien Proust and Jeanne Weil, were wealthy. Proust was a nervous and frail child. In 1882 Proust enrolled in the Lycée Condorcet. Only during his last two years of study there did he distinguish himself as a student. After a year of military service, Proust studied law and then philosophy (the study of the world and man’s place in it). Proust became known as a brilliant conversationalist with the ability to mimic others, although some considered him a snob and social climber.Proust had by 1909 gathered most of the material that became À la recherche du temps perdu (Remembrance of Things Past), he still felt unable to structure the material.On November 18, 1922, Proust died.
National Award for Children’s and Young People’s
Abstract
In search of lost time is the title of the cycle of 7 novels (Swann’s Road; In the Shadow of Girls in Bloom; The Guermantes; Sodom and Gomorrah; The Prisoner; The Fugitive, titled in the first edition Albertine Disappeared; The Time Found) by the French writer Marcel Proust.
The monumental work, which in the final version extends for about 3,500 pages, was initially drawn by the author as a bipartite in a symmetrical way, with a first part Time lost and a second Time found, to be realized in a relatively short time.
The work reaches the synthesis, long sought by Proust, between existence and creation: art is born from life and at the same time reveals life to itself. The discovery of reality and the recovery of life by the narrator happen through the fundamental instrument of memory, which allows to understand the meaning of time not only in its destructive function, but also in its creative function that is expressed in memories, especially through writing. The memory, in fact, the spontaneous and involuntary one, is not the nostalgic re-enactment of something that inexorably belongs to the past, but it is a moment authentically relived in the present, which makes timeless the part of life rediscovered.
The narrative in the first person follows the thread of memory and not that of a precise plot of romance, which in fact is absent, with continuous digressions and reflections that expand periods and chapters apparently to infinity, but to an overall look do not escape correspondences and symmetries between the numerous details scattered in the complex structure of the work.
With the outbreak of the World War, the activities of the printing works stopped. Proust, taking advantage of the forced stasis, radically modified the design of the work. The second volume In the Shadow of the Girls in Bloom came out at the end of the war and won the Goncourt Prize. The award was the official consecration of Proust among the most important novelists of his time.
