Named a Times Literary Supplement Best Book of the Year
A Pulitzer Prize-winning historian revisits Marcel Proust's masterpiece
in this essay on literature and memory, exploring the question of
identity--that of the novel's narrator and Proust's own.
This engaging reexamination of In Search of Lost Time considers how
the narrator defines himself, how this compares to what we know of
Proust himself, and what the significance is of these various points of
commonality and divergence. We know, for example, that the author did
not hide his homosexuality, but the narrator did. Why the difference? We
know that the narrator tried to marginalize his part-Jewish background.
Does this reflect the author's position, and how does the narrator
handle what he tries, but does not manage, to dismiss? These are major
questions raised by the text and reflected in the text, to which the
author's life doesn't give obvious answers. The narrator's reflections
on time, on death, on memory, and on love are as many paths leading to
the image of self that he projects.
In Proustian Uncertainties, Saul Friedländer draws on his personal
experience from a life spent investigating the ties between history and
memory to offer a fresh perspective on the seminal work.
