Marcel Proust (Author)
Marcel Proust was born in Auteuil in 1871. In his twenties he
became a conspicuous society figure, frequenting the most
fashionable Paris salons of the day. After 1899, however, his
suffering from chronic asthma, the death of his parents and his
growing disillusionment with humanity caused him to lead an
increasingly retired life. He slept by day and worked by night,
writing letters and devoting himself to the completion of A la
recherche du temps perdu. He died in 1922 before publication of the
last three volumes of his great work.
D J Enright (Translator)
Born in 1920, educated at Leamington College and Downing College,
Cambridge, D. J. Enright spent over twenty years teaching English
at universities in Egypt, Japan, Berlin, Thailand, and Singapore.
He returned to London in 1970 and later became a director of London
publishers Chatto & Windus. First and foremost a poet, he published
many collections in over fifty years, including Collected Poems-
1948-98 (1998), and translations from Japanese and German verse. He
wrote novels for both adults and children, and revised with
Madeleine Enright the English translation of Proust's In Search of
Lost Time (1992), while his enormous output of non-fiction includes
his Memoirs of a Mendicant Professor (1969), a number of critical
works, and several anthologies, among them The Oxford Book of Death
(1983) and The Faber Book of Fevers and Frets (1989). Observations
on life (high and low), literature, morals and manners, human or
animal, are recorded in The Way of the Cat (1992), and two
companion volumes to Injury Time - Interplay- A Kind of Commonplace
Book (1995) and Play Resumed- A Journal (1999). D. J. Enright
received the Cholmondeley Award in 1974; he was awarded the Queen's
Gold Medal for Poetry in 1981 and appointed OBE in 1991. Fellow of
the Royal Society of Literature since 1961, he was made Companion
of Literature by the Society in 1998, an honour granted to no more
than ten living writers at any one time. He died on the last day of
2002, after battling vigorously against cancer for seven years.
My advice is to plunge straight into Volume 1, Swann's Way there
are many who swear the experience has permanently enriched their
lives
*Daily Mail*
One of the cornerstones of the Western literary canon
*The Times*
Surely the greatest novelist of the 20th century
*Sunday Telegraph*
As close to being a definitive English version of the great novel
as we are likely to get
*Scotsman*
Proust isn't just the most profound of novelists, but the most
entertaining, too. No reader ever forgets his most killingly funny
scenes... Proust sinks deepest in readers because the book is so
exhaustively analytical, so ceaselessly truthful. Not the least of
it is the book's heavenly length, so that it inevitably takes over
your life for a long stretch... the experience of reading it
becomes, in itself, an unforgettable thing
*Independent*
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