Word: proust
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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PLEASURES AND REGRETS (221 pp.)-Marcel Proust-Lear-Crown...
...first time, is a trivial book. Languid little pseudo-pastoral sketches bedecked with whipped-cream imagery, pallid reflections on life and love in the sickliest fin de siècle manner, soft-jellied tales about soft-jellied love affairs-this is the picture the reader gets of the early Proust...
...Pleasures and Regrets is read in anticipation of a masterpiece to come, it has considerable interest. In its pale pieces can be found many of Proust's later themes: his view of human love as a sweet, evanescent sickness that briefly drives its victim to feverish pitches of feeling and then leaves him sated and bored; his fascination with the workings of human memory, which he saw as a treacherous filter distorting the qualities and meanings of past experience; and his complex attitude to high society, which delighted his snobbishness and shocked his moral feelings...
...Nobel Prize committee passed over Mark Twain, Ibsen, Hardy, Gorky, Chekhov, Conrad, Henry James, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Arnold Bennett, Willa Gather, Swinburne, George Meredith, Zola, Proust, Joyce, H. G. Wells, D. H. Lawrence, Rainer Maria Rilke. Its greatest oversight: although it was established in 1901, and Tolstoy did not die until 1910, it never gave an award to the greatest novelist of them...
...kind of mind that congeals mine at a distance and whose lucid brilliance keeps mine muscle-bound as it were and reduced to impotence.") Trying his hand as a publisher, Gide pulled one of the greatest boners in literary history when he turned down a first novel by Marcel Proust: Swann...