The Fourteen-Minute Marcel Proust: Everyone’s guide to the greatest novel ever written (Kindle Edition)
March 27th, 2010
Product Description
Today it’s called ‘In Search of Lost Time’. Early in the last century it was ‘Remembrance of Things Past’. Under whatever title, and whichever translator, Proust’s gargantuan novel has baffled American readers for more than eighty years. Over the course of a year, Daniel Ford tackled the recent and lovely Penguin/Viking editions, blogging on the internet as he read. He devotes a short chapter to each of the novel’s seven books, introducing it with a two-minute plot synoposis–thus the fourteen minutes of the title. More than that, he ruminates on one or more of its highlights, compares the Penguin/Viking translations with the classic ones based on the work of C. K. Scott Moncrieff, and–gotcha!–points to errors in the text or translation. About 7,500 words.
It took me several attempts before I got up enough momentum to read the whole of Swann’s Way, but once I did, nothing could stop me, and I finished the whole of Proust’s masterwork in a year. I read it again–aloud–to my wife after we married. (That took two winters.) More recently, a British publisher commissioned a new translation, by seven scholar-authors in three countries. I decided to read the novel again, and to blog about it as I went. This short document is the result.
For each of the novel’s seven books, I give a two-minute synopsis, and I follow that with whatever thoughts came to me as I was reading. (Again, the project took about a year.) I also had a lot of fun with “gotcha” moments, where Proust steps on his own literary toes, or the translator or the publisher goofed.
Beware! There are a lot of bandit copies of these books being peddled for Kindle readers. If you want the fusty old 1920s translations, you can get them free, starting with Swann’s Way. Personally, though, I think you should lay out eight or ten dollars for a modern, more accurate, and much more readable translation. The Penguin books that I read aren’t available in digital form, alas. But you can get another modern translation in the Modern Library series, starting here: In Search of Lost Time, Volume I: Swann’s Way (A Modern Library E-Book). Avoid all other Kindle editions. Blue skies! — Dan Ford