From Booklist
Proust is developing into one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century. This new collection contains his first literary endeavor, "Pleasures and Days," translated into English for the first time in 50 years, along with six additional stories, never before seen in English. Critiquing Proust's early stories is like appraising Picasso's four-year-old napkin drawings. There are subtle hints of brilliance, but these callow stories pale in comparison to his enigmatic opus, Remembrance of Things Past. Both works share the glitzy backdrop of Parisian high society and tiptoe through the same topics: addressing vanity, investigating the validity of sexual mores, and pondering the impact of sickness on life. Separated by 17 years, these juvenile tales set the thematic and stylistic table for the unique feast of Proust's mature work. Delicately translated by Neugroschel, the prolific three-time PEN Award winner, these early musings are priceless, insightful venturing into the mind of a maturing virtuoso. This book is a must for inclusive fiction collections. Jeff Snowbarger
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Book Description
This volume gathers together all of Marcel Proust's short fiction and six tales never before translated into English.
Language Notes
Text: English (translation)
Original Language: French
The Complete Short Stories of Marcel Proust FROM THE PUBLISHER
Here is Proust's first book, Pleasures and Days, a collection of nine short stories about amorous lives in fin-de-siecle Paris, in its first translation in over 50 years, an approximately forty pages of stories previously uncollected. Proust probes the precarious mental and erotic nuances of love, the frail mysteries of time passing and time past in highly original, surprising tales. Like James Joyce's Dubliners, in the various sketches and stories the metropolis itself plays a lead role, while each human character presents another emotional angle.
FROM THE CRITICS
Kirkus Reviews
All the fiction Proust (1871ﾽ1922) wrote, in addition to his autobiographical Jean Santeuil and his great seven-volume Remembrance of Things Past, is collected in this attractive volume, which contains the text of his first book, Pleasures and Days (1896), with a few semifictional journalistic sketches added, and six previously untranslated "early stories." The latter are mostly dated ephemera devoid of narrative tension ("The Indifferent Man" being a partial exception). The former, though self-indulgent and uneven, do comprise a winning composite portrait of earlyﾽ20th-century Parisian street, salon, and bedroom scenes—ranging from the Balzacian melodrama of "Confessions of a Young Girl" to the agreeably jaded rhythms of "The Melancholy Summer of Madame de Breyven" (which one can imagine Colette enjoying). Critic Roger Shattuck's claim (in his Foreword) that these sketches stand to Proust's masterpiece in somewhat the same relation as does Joyce's Dubliners to his Ulysses won't convince anybody. But readers who adore the mature Proust won't want to miss them.
Art & Photography
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