Collection of the Winning Pastiches from the 2023 Competition

The Société des Amis de Marcel Proust et des Amis de Combray has organised an annual Proustian pastiche competition since 2019, to recall the writer's singular taste for this demanding literary exercise. A veritable school of style, pastiche offers a way of penetrating an incomparable body of writing from within: Proust himself engaged in it with rare delight, and his emulators, generation after generation, continue to bear witness to it. The fifth edition of the competition, whose best texts this collection preserves, brought together forty-six participants, confirming the appeal this form holds for readers of every age and background.

Eleven pastiches appear in this volume: the texts of the winners of the competition's two categories, together with those that received at least two votes during the jury's deliberations. They were gathered and edited by Éric Unger, and are published under the auspices of the Société des Amis de Marcel Proust et des Amis de Combray.

Overview

Proust practised pastiche with a virtuosity and a delight that few writers have matched. In 1908–1909, he composed a series of articles concerning a single news item, imagined as written by the pens of several authors: these texts, known under the title L'Affaire Lemoine, were gathered in 1919 in the volume Pastiches et Mélanges. Time Regained, the final volume of the Recherche, also contains the celebrated pastiche of the Journal des frères Goncourt, proof that the practice runs through the entire work. Proustian style, with its unequalled density and musicality, has itself inspired numerous imitators: André Maurois (Le côté de Chelsea), Jean-Louis Curtis (La Chine m'inquiète; La France m'épuise), or, more recently, Marc Lambron and Jacques Drillon.

For its fifth edition, the competition comprised two categories: a general category, open to all, and a category reserved for participants under twenty-five. Each text submitted had to be an original, previously unpublished work, written in French, between 3,000 and 10,000 characters in length, and inspired by Proust's style to the point of being able to pass for his own pen — the theme treated being free to depart from the writer's own era, in the manner of the anachronisms he himself was not averse to allowing himself.

In 2023, the competition was placed under the sign of the hundredth anniversary of the publication of The Prisoner, the fifth volume of In Search of Lost Time. Without making it a requirement, the rules invited participants to include the word "prisonnière" (prisoner) in their pastiche, in tribute to this centenary volume. Forty-six texts were received; eleven were selected for this collection, among them the winners of each category as well as the pastiches that received at least two votes during the jury's deliberations.

Authors and Contributors

In the general category, the first prize was awarded to Killian Huaulmé for Mlle d'Azay. The second prize went to Rachel Gottlieb for Le lac des cygnes. The members' prize was awarded to Philippe Morel for La mort des poulets. Four pastiches were also recognised in this category: Le nom des villes by Alain Imoléon, Copie presque conforme by Gilles Lucas, Une partie de football by Paul Martin, and Gomorrhe et Sodome : Marceline et Albert by Emanuel de Dinechin.

In the category reserved for participants under twenty-five, the first prize was awarded to Clément Albaret for Chaînes musicales. The second prize went to Héloïse Gambier for Un amour de nouveau-né. The members' prize was awarded to Valentin Staebler for Les coquelicots — Réminiscence d'un songe d'été. One further pastiche was recognised in this category: Humeur vitreuse by Amélie Lartaux.

The jury, in alphabetical order, was composed of Jérôme Bastianelli, Élyane Dezon-Jones, Emily Eells, Adrien Goetz, of the Académie des beaux-arts, Isabelle Serça and Éric Unger.

Contents

• Introduction
• General Category — Winners and Distinguished Pastiches
• Under-Twenty-Five Category — Winners and Distinguished Pastiches
• Jury Members
• Competition Rules

Bibliographic Information

• Format: paperback, 109 pages
• Publisher: Société des Amis de Marcel Proust et des Amis de Combray
• Legal deposit: May 2023