Born in 1871, Marcel Proust was intent on becoming a writer from an early age. For much of his youth, Proust led the life of a man-about-town, frequenting fashionable Paris drawing rooms and literary salons, which would form the background of a number of his early stories and sketches.
Proust's great literary work "Remembrance of Things Past", the major French literary statement of the 20th century, looks back at the old social order while noting the rise of a different way of life. It is extraordinary not only for its length, but for the remarkable observations of the aspirations, the foibles and the emotions of life.
This new biography is written and read by Neville Jason who, through his recordings for Naxos AudioBooks, has become the voice of Proust for a generation.
Music: Hahn, Debussy, Franck
“Having abridged and read all eight volumes of Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, Jason completes his homage to the French writer with this audio biography. As the novel sequence is in any case an intensely personal distillation of Proust’s life, Jason's study leads us again and again to the books rather than finding much of a life apart from them. However, the evocation of people and places is well researched and the political and social contexts are efficiently elaborated, including Proust’s part in the Dreyfus affair that rocked France at the turn of the last century.”
