Presented for the first time in English, the recently discovered early
manuscripts of the twentieth century's most towering literary figure
offer uncanny glimpses of his emerging genius and the creation of his
masterpiece.
One of the most significant literary events of the century, the
discovery of manuscript pages containing early drafts of Marcel Proust's
In Search of Lost Time put an end to a decades-long search for the
Proustian grail. The Paris publisher Bernard de Fallois claimed to have
viewed the folios, but doubts about their existence emerged when none
appeared in the Proust manuscripts bequeathed to the Bibliothèque
Nationale in 1962. The texts had in fact been hidden among Fallois's
private papers, where they were found upon his death in 2018. The
Seventy-Five Folios and Other Unpublished Manuscripts presents these
folios here for the first time in English, along with seventeen other
brief unpublished texts. Extensive commentary and notes by the Proust
scholar Nathalie Mauriac Dyer offer insightful critical analysis.
Characterized by Fallois as the "precious guide" to understanding
Proust's masterpiece, the folios contain early versions of six episodes
included in the novel. Readers glimpse what Proust's biographer
Jean-Yves Tadié describes as the "sacred moment" when the great work
burst forth for the first time. The folios reveal the autobiographical
extent of Proust's writing, with traces of his family life scattered
throughout. Before the existence of Charles Swann, for example, we find
a narrator named Marcel, a testament to what one scholar has called "the
gradual transformation of lived experience into (auto)fiction in
Proust's elaboration of the novel."
Like a painter's sketches and a composer's holographs, Proust's folios
tell a story of artistic evolution. A "dream of a book, a book of a
dream," Fallois called them. Here is a literary magnum opus finding its
final form.
