The Captive

Marcel Proust

nov 2021 · Phoemixx Classics Ebooks

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The Captive Marcel Proust - In The Captive, Prousts narrator describes living in his mothers Paris apartment with his lover, Albertine, and subsequently falling out of love with her.The longest book I've ever read, longer than those with many more pages. I don't mean the complete Search -- I'm referring to this volume, a mere 936 pages that took me forever. If I'm honest with this impression, I should admit that I find Proust sort of stupefying most of the time. I can only read 15 pages at a time without dosing off or reaching for my phone. But every once in a while there's an image or insight that makes it all worthwhile. I mean, the book is regularly studded with the best of things I look for in books, my copy is regularly dogeared, but this installment is dense and nutso. For the most part, Marcel is with Albertine but doesn't want to be with her ("The Captive"), but once she's gone ("The Fugitive") he's obsessed with her again, madly in love, until he learns of her sudden spoiler alert. Most of the musing seems to be about whether Albertine is getting it on with women

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French novelist, best known for his 3000 page masterpiece À la recherche du temps perdu (Remembrance of Things Past or In Search of Lost Time), a pseudo-autobiographical novel told mostly in a stream-of-consciousness style.Born in the first year of the Third Republic, the young Marcel, like his narrator, was a delicate child from a bourgeois family. He was active in Parisian high society during the 80s and 90s, welcomed in the most fashionable and exclusive salons of his day. However, his position there was also one of an outsider, due to his Jewishness and homosexuality. Towards the end of 1890s Proust began to withdraw more and more from society, and although he was never entirely reclusive, as is sometimes made out, he lapsed more completely into his lifelong tendency to sleep during the day and work at night. He was also plagued with severe asthma, which had troubled him intermittently since childhood, and a terror of his own death, especially in case it should come before his novel had been completed. The first volume, after some difficulty finding a publisher, came out in 1913, and Proust continued to work with an almost inhuman dedication on his masterpiece right up until his death in 1922, at the age of 51.