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10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Prisoner / The Fugitive, April 24, 2005
This is volume five of the superlative new translation of "In Search of Lost Time," containing the two books of the Albertine cycle, which are now titled "The Prisoner" (translated by Carol Clark) and "The Fugitive" (tr. Peter Collier). Though I haven't yet read their translations, I have found the new editions to be a wonderful improvement over those done in the 1920s by Charles Scott Moncrieff. So I have no hesitation in giving them five stars.
Unhappily for American readers, current U.S. copyright law prevents Viking/Penguin from publishing the last two volumes of "Lost Time" in this country until 95 years after Proust's death, or 2018. The first four volumes have been published here in handsome hardcovers (more handsome than the British edition), but the only way to obtain this and the final volume ("Finding Time Again") is to find an imported British hardcover or paperback. -- Dan Ford
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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
From obsession to oblivion., July 14, 2002
This volume contains parts five and six of Proust's huge novel; additionally, these two parts represent the first posthumous releases from A la Recherche du Temps Perdu. If there was any doubt in my mind that these parts, published without the author's oversight, could not continue the excellence of the preceding parts, this fear was quickly dispelled. The Captive and The Fugitive contain some of the most beautiful of Proust's prose, as well as insights into Parisian society, art and the inner thoughts of the narrator not contained elsewhere in the novel.The Captive, originally published in 1923, tells the story of Marcel and Albertine, now kept by the narrator in his Paris home. This co-habitation is not based on love, nor even lust, but on the obsessive jealousy of Marcel based on his almost psycopathic fear of Albertine's lesbian proclivities. By this point in the novel, Marcel has removed himself from society and is content to remain for the most part in his room. Albertine, living in an adjoining room, is allowed out of the house only with a chaperon and to destinations decided in advance by Marcel. It is the ironic twist that Proust puts on the idea of imprisonment that forms the backbone of this part of the novel. Not only is Albertine kept prisoner by Marcel, but Marcel is no less the prisoner of his own obsession. It can arguably be stated that each of the parts of the novel corresponds to one of the senses. If this is the case, the Captive surely corresponds to the sense of hearing. It is while listening to Vinteuil's septet that Marcel realizes that art is more than the mechanical manipulation of ideas by color, words or music. Just as Vinteuil has created a complex musical form out of the "catchy" phrase so admired by Swann and Mme Verdurin's little group, Marcel awakens to the limitless possibilities of artistic expression. This epiphanic moment awakens in the narrator a desire to commit himself to the life of a writer. In order to accomplish this wish, he decides that he must end his affair with Albertine. Marcel's decision to part with Albertine on his own terms is thwarted when he learns that it is she who has made the final break and has left his apartment. Thus begins The Fugitive (originally translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff, with a freight train full of poetic license, as The Sweet Cheat Gone). The Fugitive represents the most introspective part of a very introspective novel, and in it Proust's zeal for self-examination is pursued with un-relentless fervor as layer upon layer of the author's persona in exposed to the reader. Marcel's world is turned up side down when he learns that Albertine has died in a riding accident. His obsession, so debilitating when his mistress was alive, continues unabated after her death and the narrator continues with his scrutiny of Albertine's private life as if she was still alive. He finally realizes that obsession cannot be eliminated by death and that relief can only come with the passsing of time and the ensuing state of oblivion. Although Albertine's memory has not been totally erased, the torment that she has caused Marcel diminishes greatly and he is able to resume his life and work. However, it is a different world into which Marcel emerges after his long period of grief. Just as Marcel's personal life was changed by a freak accident, the social life in which he has emersed himself is going through social changes just as fundamental. The old aristocracy, becoming more and more deperate for cash, is falling prey to the easy lure of mariages of convenience in which aristocratic titles are exchanged for hefty dowries. His two friends, Gilberte Swann and Robert de Saint-Loup, are married to each other thus accomplishing what Charles Swann could never do - have his daughter received by the Duchess de Guermantes. Even more revolutionary, a simple seamstress (Jupien's niece) marries into the aristocracy forever destroying any romantic impressions that Marcel might still hold of the Guermantes and Meseglise Ways. Clearly Marcel's world is changing, but it is the change in his friend, Robert de Saint-Loup, that causes him the greatest pain as he realizes that even friendships are all too often broken by the passage of time.
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14 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Through a Glass Darkly, April 9, 1998
Having just gotten my B.A. a couple of years ago I must have been in an ambitious mood or something, because I decided to read the whole of In Search of Lost Time, cover to cover, pausing only for food and sleep. It's the sort of work that looks more like Mount Everest than a regular ol' novel when you first start reading it, but it turned out to be one of the best companions I could have asked for over the past few years. Proust was a mmaster of the cooly detatched but almost unbelievably sensitive description of human motivation, and his perspective on the harmless, but decadent latter-day French aristocracy whose attitudes and practices provie most of the material for the seven books in the series, is deeply selfish and amoral, but also inexhaustibly curious and sympathetic. This constrast comes out most noticeably in The Captive and The Fugitive, which basically consist of several hundred pages of reflection upon Proust's love affair with a young girl named Albertine. The pair of novels are full of long, sustained reflections on the nature of love, and upon the deep mysteries that attend upon trying to understand what makes other people tick. There is an especially lovely passage in which Proust describes the feelings he undergoes while watching Albertine sleep. By the time of the end of the novel, though, the reader finds himself left with the curious sense that one doesn't actually know anything at all concrete about the "Fugitive" Albertine. Nobody was better than Proust at dissecting the motives and the mores of other people without ever gining in to the novelist's illusion that he understood them better than they did themselves. I recommend these novels to anyone who is up for a bit of a challenge (even Scott Moncrieff's lovely translation of the French could never make Proust an "easy read"), and who is prepared to be enlightened by the reading of a novel even if it doesn't issue in the usual "payoff" of a sense of superior understanding in relation to the charatcters depicted there.
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