Customer Reviews

The 14-Minute Marcel Proust: A Very Short Guide to the Greatest Novel Ever Written

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It took me 15 minutes to page through Fall's book and read the synopsis of Proust's masterwork. I was tickled at how much info the author was able to slip into his breezy descriptions of the volumes. Keeping in mind that like Pamela, you don't read Proust for the plot, still, this is as easy and informative an introduction to A la recherche I can imagine. Except for the comic books. Those comic books are astonishingly helpful.

I've read Proust a couple of times, and this may not be quite so crystalline for the newcomer. But the author's comments and gotcha!s do help to point out who and what you should be looking for when you go on to read the entire oeuvre, which you will want to do when you finish this little book.

It took me several attempts before I got up enough momentum to read the whole of Swann's Way, but once I did, nothing could stop me, and I finished the whole of Proust's masterwork in a year. I read it again--aloud--to my wife after we married. (That took two winters.) More recently, a British publisher commissioned a new translation, by seven scholar-authors in three countries. I decided to read the novel again, and to blog about it as I went. This short book (12,500 words in the most recent revision) is the result.

For each of the novel's seven books, I give a two-minute synopsis, and I follow that with whatever thoughts came to me as I was reading. (Again, the project took about a year.) I also had a lot of fun with "gotcha" moments, where Proust steps on his own literary toes, or the translator or the publisher goofed.

Kindle owners, beware! There are a lot of bandit copies of Proust being peddled in e-book format. Almost all are ripoffs of the 1920s Scott Moncrieff translations, which were digitized by the Gutenberg Project. You're better off investing ten dollars in a modern, more accurate, and much more readable translation. The Penguin books that I read are now all available in Kindle editions, and I link to them in 'The 14-Minute Marcel Proust'. The first four volumes of the Modern Library translations are also available. Avoid all other Kindle editions.