Cher ami … Votre Marcel Proust

Marcel Proust and his Correspondances

Edited by Jürgen Ritte and Reiner Speck
with texts (German/French) by Philippe Chardin, Eva Erdmann, Kirsten von Hagen, Luzius Keller, Ursula Link-Heer, Rainer Moritz, Mireille Naturel, George Pistorius, Angelica Rieger, Jürgen Ritte, Manfred Schneider, Michael Sostarich, Caroline Szylowics
400 p with 700 coloured illustrations
310 x 230 mm, clothbound, embossed with double folded dustjacket

ISBN 978-3-940953-04-9
 

78,00 €

Key to the world

The evocation of a world of remembrance via a cake dunked in a cup of tea – that famous madeleine episode in Marcel Proust’s »In Search of Lost Time« – is a key experience from which no one can escape after reading the great novel.
Proust was nothing if not an avid correspondent; and subsequent to his withdrawal from society to his cork-lined room, his correspondence seems to have become the only link between the inner and outside worlds. At the same time it is ferment for the over a decade-long genesis of his magnum opus. Many of the topics dealt with there both exhaustively and with great insight can be found in embryo in Recherche in quotations, which have in part been taken verbatim.
The idea that the nucleus of the whole work is actually laid out in Proust’s letters is explored by an international body of writers in a series of essays. The essays contain a lot of new research about the recipients and their involvement in work’s the publication and the history of its reception. The book also offers a chronicle of Proust’s life, a contextual commentary of the letters and a bibliographical compilation of the editions of correspondence with several illustrations of the material. The reader is granted an opportunity to penetrate the secrets of Proust’s ecriture in the form of facsimiled letters, which oscillate between the poles of lucid thought and illegibility lamented by many a correspondent. Addresses, omissions, allusions and crossings-out reveal further clues about Marcel Proust’s private life so shrouded in mystery.