French Novelist Marcel Proust, Wrote Swann's Way

Remembrance of Things Past a Classic of Modern Literature

Dec 15, 2008

Early 20th-century French novelist Marcel Proust composed Remembrance of Things Past, a seven-volume novel that changed the history of European Literature.

The work, which Proust began in 1909 and continued working on until his death in 1922, spans more than 3,000 pages and includes more than a thousand characters. The book moves backward and forward in time and has a loose narrative structure. It is the writing and the ideas, rather than plot, that has brought the work such high acclaim.

Proust's Early Years

Born in 1871, Marcel Proust grew up in a well-to-do household in Paris. His father was a prominent doctor who authored important studies on the spread of cholera. Proust's mother came from a socially prominent family. The family's Jewish heritage would be an important theme in Proust's writing.

Proust was a sickly child, suffering from the age of nine from acute asthma attacks that would affect him the rest of his life. He was very close to his mother, another biographical detail that would figure importantly in his writing.

Begins Writing Remembrance of Things Past

Proust began À la recherche du temps perdu, translated as Remembrance of Things Past or In Search of Lost Time, after about 15 years writing fiction and translations of writers John Ruskin and Thomas Carlyle, among others.

He published the first installment, Swann's Way, in 1913 to great acclaim. Author Andre Gide was one of the book's early champions. The next volume, Within a Budding Grove, would not be published until 1919, and the next volume, The Guermantes Way, came about a year later. By then, Proust's literary reputation was established.

Proust's Last Years

Marcel Proust continued on with his life's work until his death in 1922. He is known not just as a literary genius but also a true eccentric who had his bedroom lined with cork to keep out noise. Frail and sensitive, he grew increasingly introverted and focused on his fiction, writing and editing from his bed sometimes all night long.

The writer died of pneumonia in 1922 and was buried in Paris's Père Lachaise cemetery. The last three volumes of his work were published posthumously.

Proust's Writing Style and Themes

Marcel Proust broke ground as a stylist, with pages-long sentences that were famed for their elegance and symmetry. More than just a brilliant and poetic writer, Proust was oft-imitated for his method of storytelling, a technique called stream of consciousness for the way that events unfold according to the writer's mind, rather than chronologically.

Several of Proust's themes were also notable. A homosexual, the author wrote about "the life of the invert" and created a number of gay characters, which was groundbreaking in the 1920s.

Proust's Jewish background also found its way into Remembrance. The Dreyfus Affair, a political scandal in which a French artillery officer named Alfred Dreyfus, a Jew, was wrongly convicted of treason, is a major theme in the work.

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