Remembrance of Things Past (three volume set)

Considering how many lists of "great books" as "Remembrance of Things Past" has landed on, not that many people seem to have actually it. That could be because its sheer size and reputation for "greatness" is so intimidating. Take a couple of pointers from someone who is working their way through it: First, it's just not that hard. Long, yes, but actually a relatively light read compared to so much of the modern literature it inspired. It's an impressionistic, meandering study of a man's life in late nineteenth and early twentieth century France (actually a covert autobiography of author Marcel Proust himself with added fiction), told in the first person. The narrator is at least as interested in the characters, places, and milieus he encounters along the way as he is in his own story. Plot simply isn't that important; people are. What that means is that it is easy to put down and then pick back up later without feeling lost, but still get completely absorbed into the narrator's intellectual bourgeoisie world while reading. It doesn't hurt that Proust based a number of the characters on historical figures and friends-one character is based on a combination of author Anatole France and another author, for instance; a painter in the book is more than reminiscent of Claude Monet; many prominent Parisian socialites of the era appear in the book in various guises; etc. On the other hand, while Proust tells us the stories of these characters and their worlds, he also tells us narrator's thoughts about and reactions to them. It's a story about a world at the same time it is a story about interiority. In that way, it is easy to see why it broke new ground in modernism. Our second point: owning only one volume of a multi-volume set-the form in which this book is inevitably published-won't do you any good, either as a collector or as a reader. The original was progressively published in seven volumes and has been published in many other versions since. The first volume came out in 1913; the last in 1927, all with individual titles but with the over-arching title of "À la recherche du temps perdu." This Random House publication, which arranges things into three reasonable-sized hardbacks in one slipcase, is a wonderful way to attack the work. For one thing, it starts with what may be called the authoritative version of those original seven volumes, which wasn't always in existence. Proust left things in a mess when he died in 1922, the last volume still unfinished and the two previous volumes still unpublished. His copious notes were nearly illegible but, of course, no one could consult him as to his intent, which meant for decades there was no "definitive" book. In 1954, that very thing finally came out, now called "the Pléiade edition" after its French publisher. That edition is what Random House used as the basis for this release. Translation, however, is its own can of worms, one which Random House also approached well. C. K. Scott Moncrieff was the first to translate all seven of Proust's original volumes into English. His set the standard, though there have been arguments against it and new translations since. (He is the one who named the book "Remembrance of Things Past," which is not literal. You are more likely to see it referred to as "In Search of Lost Time" these days.) Ironically, he died while translating Proust's final volume.the one Proust himself left uncompleted because of his death. Andreas Mayor receives the translation credit for that. Random House kept the bulk of the Scott Moncrieff translation but had Terence Kilmartin make revisions, and, although it says this nowhere in the title page or copyright page, from the translator's note, it sounds as if Kilmartin also served as an overall editor. Random House arranged Proust's original seven volumes this way: The first two, "Swann's Way" and "Within a Budding Grove," are in the first hardback, simply labeled "Volume I." Volume II contains "The Guermantes Way" and "Citi.…