Proust for the First Time — Bulletin Marcel Proust, Special Issue No. 70

On the occasion of the seventieth anniversary of the Bulletin Marcel Proust, the Société des Amis de Marcel Proust et des Amis de Combray invited seventy public figures — writers, academics, actors, publishers, musicians — to recount their first encounter with Proust's work. Blending memories of adolescence, snapshots of life and reading experiences, these seventy testimonies, each starting from the discovery of À la recherche du temps perdu, illustrate the lasting and profound imprint of Proust's work on the lives and works of our contemporaries.

This volume also contains a hitherto unpublished poem by Marcel Proust, dedicated to a soldier with whom he did his military service, Sergeant Maurice Henry.

Overview

Proust for the First Time brings together seventy short testimonies, each devoted to the memory of a first reading of Proust — the shock of a sentence, the discovery of a borrowed or gifted volume, a real or metaphorical madeleine. The diversity of the voices gathered (writers, academics, artists, figures from the world of film and music) gives this special issue the form of a living mosaic of what Proust continues to provoke in his readers, whatever their path into the Recherche.

The book opens with a previously unpublished document: an early poem by Marcel Proust, written around the spring of 1890 during his military service, dedicated to Sergeant Maurice Henry.

Contributors

Among the seventy contributors are, in particular, André Aciman, Jean-Jacques Aillagon, Fanny Ardant, Pierre Assouline, Stéphane Bern, Antoine Compagnon, Charles Dantzig, Guillaume Gallienne, Adrien Goetz, Maylis de Kerangal, Philippe Lançon, Marc Lambron, Pierre Lemaitre, Catherine Meurisse, Mona Ozouf, Didier Sandre, Jean-Yves Tadié, Edmund White and Kazuyoshi Yoshikawa, alongside numerous other writers, academics and artists.

Bibliographic Information

• Format: paperback, 16 × 24 cm
• Pages: 279
• Price: 12 €
• ISBN: 978-2-9568373-6-7
• Publisher: Société des Amis de Marcel Proust et des Amis de Combray