Magic Lantern of Marcel Proust: A Critical Study of Remembrance of Things Past

Remembrance of Things Past is more than a novel; it is a work in which a single person’s life is transformed into a mythology, with its own pantheon of gods, its own religious rituals, and its own moral laws. A total vision, it does not rely on any system outside itself for support. It is as if Dante had set out to write the Paradiso and the Inferno utilising only the facts of his own existence without any reference to Christianity…Other novelists describe or invent worlds. Remembrance of Things Past is an entire universe created and interpreted by Marcel Proust. – from Chapter 1. Moss lays out the sweeping claims and overarching structure of Remembrance of Things Past – the significance of Swann’s Way and the Guermantes Way, or why there are such long party scenes – and is equally good at bringing to light all sorts of tiny, revealing details. – from the new Foreword by Damion Searls