Publishers Weekly
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.)
Les Inrocks - Nelly Kaprièlian
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.
Christopher Prendergast
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.’
The Telegraph - Bernard Richards
Fascinating…In these drafts, we see the emerging elements of the Recherche as through a glass darkly.
Translation Review - Vincent Kling
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.
André Aciman
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.
Le Parisien-Aujourd’hui en France - Yves Jaeglé
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 Monde des livres - Bertrand Leclair
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.
Caroline Weber
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.
Le Figaro - Antoine Compagnon
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 Point - Michel Schneider
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.
Marianne - Lucas Person
A fascinating insight into the genesis of Marcel Proust’s work.
Times Literary Supplement - Marion Schmid
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.
Libération - Mathieu Lindon
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.
La Croix - Francine de Martinoir
The raw ingredients of that great adventure, one of the most important of the past century, are assembled here.
Harper’s - Claire Messud
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.
Télérama - Nathalie Crom
‘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.
Michael Dirda
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.
L’Obs - Jérôme Garcin
‘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.
Charlie Hebdo - Philippe Lançon
Memories are reliable only insofar as they are creations. To understand this, one must simply read how Proust transformed a biscotte into a madeleine.
Literary Review - Peter Davidson
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.
