Marcel Proust’s à la recherche du temps perdu (In Remembrance of Things Past), is one of the greatest novels of the last century. The title actually refers to seven separate novels, all meditations on the same theme. Understandably, a great many readers never get past the initial one, Swann's Way (Du côté de chez Swann). A master of the French language, Proust was fortunate to have in Scott Moncrief a terrific translator, who captures his style—and his meaning—perfectly. And I find that, the third novel, is Moncrief’s best work. Proust was not simply remembering, he was attempting to recapture a time that had been lost. Not just the literal memory, but the essence of it, its look and feel. In rereading Germantes, I decided it gives the reader a better idea of Proust’s philosophical aim, the brilliance of his style, and his sly wit.
An authoritative new edition of the third volume in Marcel Proust's epic masterwork, In Search of Lost Time
Marcel Proust's monumental seven-part novel In Search of Lost Time is considered by many to be the greatest novel of the twentieth century. This edition of volume three, The Guermantes Way, is edited and annotated by noted Proust scholar William C. Carter, who endeavors to bring the classic C. K. Scott Moncrieff translation closer to the spirit and style of the author's original text.
Continuing the story begun in Swann's Way and continued in In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower,…
Musil’s novel, like Proust’s, is at top off the world’s greatest modern novels, as well as being an extended meditation on the final days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Like War and Peace, it takes us a while to get into it, and by the same token, Musil, like Tolstoy was deeply interested in how history happens., and if anything, his insights are more profound. Like Goethe, Musil was a master of the complexities of the German language. So both pose the translator with immense difficulties. But it’s a pleasure to recommend this translation, which is not only remarkably good at untangling Musi;’s complex sentences, but making them eminently readable.
It is 1913, and Viennese high society is determined to find an appropriate way of celebrating the seventieth jubilee of the accession of Emperor Franz Josef. But as the aristocracy tries to salvage something illustrious out of the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the ordinary Viennese world is beginning to show signs of more serious rebellion. Caught in the middle of this social labyrinth is Ulrich: youngish, rich, an ex-soldier, seducer and scientist.
Unable to deceive himself that the jumble of attributes and values that his world has bestowed on him amounts to anything…
The Victorians were scandalized by Sterne’s hilarious account of his childhood and his family, retaliated by calling it “satire.” There’s no shortage of humor, from Tristam’s explanation of how he knows when he was conceived to his narrow childhood escape to misundertstandings about the location of his uncle’s war wound. But it’s a brilliant interpretration of Locke’s argument about how the mind works, specifically in the association of ideas. The same deep insight that was the basis of the methodology of psychoanalysis conceptualized Sigmund Freud. The former isn’t an inference: Tristram explains it perfectly in the novel, and the complexity of his account is up there with Proust’s, Every time I re-read it, it gets not just funnier, but more profound.
Endlessly digressive, boundlessly imaginative and unmatched in its absurd and timeless wit, Laurence Sterne's The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman is edited with an introduction by Melvin New and Joan New, and includes a critical essay by Christopher Ricks in Penguin Classics.
Laurence Sterne's great masterpiece of bawdy humour and rich satire defies any attempt to categorize it, with a rich metafictional narrative that might classify it as the first 'postmodern' novel. Part novel, part digression, its gloriously disordered narrative interweaves the birth and life of the unfortunate 'hero' Tristram Shandy, the eccentric philosophy of his father Walter,…
