The Seventy-Five Folios and Other Unpublished Manuscripts

April 17, 2023
The fascinating, handwritten early drafts of Marcel Proust’s cycle In Search of Lost Time, discovered in 2018, come to life in Taylor’s resplendent translation. Found among the papers of a French publisher, these folios are Proust’s first attempts at getting down characters and situations that eventually structured his novels. The family disagreements of “An Evening in the Countryside” and the childhood strolls through rural France of “The Villebon Way and the Méséglise Way” introduce the domestic atmosphere and lush landscape that became the setting of Swann’s Way. In “Young Girls,” the prototype of In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, the narrator encounters a coterie of girls at the seaside and schemes to make their acquaintance. “Place-Names: The Place” includes sketches of people encountered while traveling. Throughout, Proust expresses his signature obsessions through his experience of memory, art, and social machinations. The insightful commentary by Dyer traces the trajectories of themes introduced in the folios and notebooks, and observes Proust’s efforts to blur, in his writing, the specifics of his own life, disguising his Jewishness and his homosexuality despite leaving clues. This is a magnificent addition to Proust’s oeuvre.