A Washington Post Book That Shouldn’t Be Overlooked

“Fascinating…In these drafts, we see the emerging elements of the Recherche as through a glass darkly.” —The Telegraph

“If you delight in flickering recollections, glimpses and mirrors, hints and foreshadowings, this is, urgently, the book for you.” —Literary Review

“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…This is a magnificent addition to Proust’s oeuvre.” —Publishers Weekly

The discovery, in 2018, of manuscript pages containing early drafts of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time was one of the most significant literary events in living memory. The Seventy-Five Folios and Other Unpublished Manuscripts presents these fragments for the first time in English, along with seventeen other brief unpublished texts. Extensive commentary and notes by Proust scholar Nathalie Mauriac Dyer provide insightful critical analysis.

A precious guide to understanding Proust’s masterpiece, the folios include early versions of six episodes appearing in the novel. Readers also glimpse the autobiographical extent of Proust’s writing, with traces of his family life scattered throughout. Before the existence of Charles Swann, 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. Here is a literary magnum opus finding its final form.