The Seventy-Five Folios and Other Unpublished Manuscripts

by Marcel Proust, Nathalie Mauriac Dyer (Editor), Sam Taylor (Translator), Jean-Yves Tadié (Preface by)

Overview

Presented for the first time in English, the recently discovered early manuscripts of the twentieth century’s most towering literary figure offer uncanny glimpses of his emerging genius and the creation of his masterpiece.

One of the most significant literary events of the century, the discovery of manuscript pages containing early drafts of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time put an end to a decades-long search for the Proustian grail. The Paris publisher Bernard de Fallois claimed to have viewed the folios, but doubts about their existence emerged when none appeared in the Proust manuscripts bequeathed to the Bibliothèque Nationale in 1962. The texts had in fact been hidden among Fallois’s private papers, where they were found upon his death in 2018. The Seventy-Five Folios and Other Unpublished Manuscripts presents these folios here for the first time in English, along with seventeen other brief unpublished texts. Extensive commentary and notes by the Proust scholar Nathalie Mauriac Dyer offer insightful critical analysis.

Characterized by Fallois as the “precious guide” to understanding Proust’s masterpiece, the folios contain early versions of six episodes included in the novel. Readers glimpse what Proust’s biographer Jean-Yves Tadié describes as the “sacred moment” when the great work burst forth for the first time. The folios reveal the autobiographical extent of Proust’s writing, with traces of his family life scattered throughout. Before the existence of Charles Swann, for example, we find a narrator named Marcel, a testament to what one scholar has called “the gradual transformation of lived experience into (auto)fiction in Proust’s elaboration of the novel.”

Like a painter’s sketches and a composer’s holographs, Proust’s folios tell a story of artistic evolution. A “dream of a book, a book of a dream,” Fallois called them. Here is a literary magnum opus finding its final form.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780674271012
Publisher:	Harvard University Press
Publication date:	04/25/2023
Pages:	360
Sales rank:	115,623
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Marcel Proust (1871–1922), French novelist and essayist, is best known for his seven-volume masterpiece, In Search of Lost Time.

Nathalie Mauriac Dyer is a senior researcher at the Institute of Modern Texts and Manuscripts Division of the National Center for Scientific Research in France, where she leads the Proust team. She is the author of Proust inachevé: Le dossier Albertine disparue and co-curator of the centenary exhibit Marcel Proust: La fabrique de l’oeuvre at the Bibliothèque Nationale. She is the great-granddaughter of Robert Proust, Marcel’s brother.

Sam Taylor is an award-winning literary translator and novelist. He has translated more than sixty books from French, including Laurent Binet’s HHhH, Leïla Slimani’s The Perfect Nanny, and Maylis de Kerangal’s The Heart.

Date of Birth:

July 10, 1871

Date of Death:

November 18, 1922

Place of Birth:

Auteuil, near Paris, France

Place of Death:

Paris, France

Editorial Reviews

04/17/2023

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. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

The reader immerses herself in these chapters, and their later reworkings, which are already steeped in the theme—sparked here by a biscotte rather than a madeleine dipped in tea—that will become the key to the entire work: reminiscence.

Les Inrocks - Nelly Kaprièlian

The publication last year of the now famous seventy-five pages was a major literary and scholarly event, the ‘lost’ pages in question shedding valuable light on both the conception and the compositional history of Proust’s novel. To have them now in translation is a real treat for English readers of Proust. Sam Taylor’s rendering is also a treat in its own right, exact and fully responsive to nuance and to the rhythms of what Proust himself called ‘the melody of the song beneath the words.’

Christopher Prendergast

Fascinating…In these drafts, we see the emerging elements of the Recherche as through a glass darkly.

The Telegraph - Bernard Richards

Added to the importance of the folios in themselves are the depth and brilliance of the critical apparatus, the notes and commentary, that is, and the excellence of Taylor’s translation…The immense tapestry—or perhaps, instead, the complex and multilayered palimpsest Dyer presents through her magnificent scholarship and comprehensive knowledge—can only increase the sense of wonder at Proust’s achievement. All readers are in her debt. And in the translator’s, too.

Translation Review - Vincent Kling

Can we read Proust’s epic today and not care to know how it came about? In these pages, hidden from public view for a whole century, we can almost feel how Proust spent a lifetime planning and writing his book, picking his way towards what would become his great contribution to humanity.

André Aciman

Written in 1908, at a time when Marcel Proust—dandy, translator, art critic—had completely abandoned the novel, these pages represent the matrix of In Search of Lost Time…This edition also contains other unpublished manuscripts, fragmentary but fascinating…A family album far less intimidating than the masterpiece itself, and one that leaves you with a longing to dive into that work, for the first time or the hundredth.

Le Parisien-Aujourd’hui en France - Yves Jaeglé

Other important unpublished texts are featured among the sketches gathered at the end of The Seventy-Five Folios…Since most of them are later versions, the path that led to In Search of Lost Time can be retraced step by step—and the intoxication arises from seeing objects, emotions, mannerisms migrating from one character to another, while the question of truth is woven through all of them. A book full of surprises.

Le Monde des livres - Bertrand Leclair

The recent discovery of the long-lost, seventy-five-page first draft that blossomed into In Search of Lost Time was one of the great miracles of modern publishing. Sam Taylor’s magnificently deft and elegant English translation of that work is another. An indispensable read for Anglophone Proust lovers everywhere, The Seventy-Five Folios is a literary treasure in its own right.

Caroline Weber

Readers will fall for the Marcel Proust we discover here because he is so human, only just emerging from his grief, loving and attentive toward his family, loyal and generous. The smoke and mirrors surrounding the publication of Proust’s manuscripts is as nothing to the writing contained within. It was well worth waiting more than half a century to read.

Le Figaro - Antoine Compagnon

Nathalie Mauriac Dyer deserves praise for her edition of the Folios, as well as a fascinating commentary on their contents and their genealogy. The discovery of these texts, which were known about but assumed to be lost, was headline news. But what literary value did they contain? Not all unpublished manuscripts are worth reading…The Seventy-Five Folios, written in 1908, is hugely significant.

Le Point - Michel Schneider

A fascinating insight into the genesis of Marcel Proust’s work.

Marianne - Lucas Person

One cannot help but feel a certain sadness when coming to the end of [The Seventy-Five Folios]. Reading them takes us on a journey of rediscovering the Recherche through the prism of its first version, which holds many more surprises in store for the reader. But it also brings back the enchantment of reading Proust for the first time.

Times Literary Supplement - Marion Schmid

This book takes us back to the time when that famous first line—‘For a long time I used to go to bed early’—did not yet exist and when In Search of Lost Time seemed little more than a whim…It is moving to see emblematic episodes from the future novel appearing here in the nudity of a first draft, even if the names of Balbec, Combray, Swann, and Guermantes did not yet exist either.

Libération - Mathieu Lindon

The raw ingredients of that great adventure, one of the most important of the past century, are assembled here.

La Croix - Francine de Martinoir

For those interested in understanding Proust’s masterpiece in its social, historical, or autobiographical context, this book is indispensable…Even in these early sketches, his prose dazzles and thrills, by turns depicting recognition and wonder, sometimes overdone but always with the precise intelligence, meditation, and humor for which Proust is renowned.

Harper’s - Claire Messud

‘A Search before the letter,’ writes Nathalie Mauriac Dyer, to whom we owe the admirable critical apparatus of this volume…as well as a fascinating commentary in which she explains the importance of this 1908 novel to the genesis of Proust’s later masterpiece.

Télérama - Nathalie Crom

For years, Proust scholars knew about the existence of early drafts of material that would later be revised and incorporated into In Search of Lost Time. Only recently, though, were those manuscripts rescued from private hands. That treasure trove is finally available in English…Proust really is magical.

Michael Dirda

‘What was in those seventy-five folios? What qualities did they possess that made him write them? What flaws did they display that made him abandon them?’ asks Jean-Yves Tadié in the preface to this volume, brilliantly edited and annotated by Nathalie Mauriac Dyer, who describes those early texts as a ‘miniature Search.’ Everything here heralds the masterpiece to come.

L’Obs - Jérôme Garcin

Memories are reliable only insofar as they are creations. To understand this, one must simply read how Proust transformed a biscotte into a madeleine.

Charlie Hebdo - Philippe Lançon

The translation by Sam Taylor is so accomplished that it is uncannily invisible. Many of the qualities of the finished work are present in these haunting drafts: the power of the remembered past, the floodtide of total recall, the poetry of distant memory, the exquisite observation of place, light, and season…If you delight in flickering recollections, glimpses and mirrors, hints and foreshadowings, this is, urgently, the book for you.

Literary Review - Peter Davidson