![]() In Search of Lost Time is the story of how the narrator (also called Marcel) becomes a writer how he finds his vocation and the subject of the novel which, by the end of the final volume, he is ready to begin writing. Although the word "Fin" can clearly be seen at the foot of one page of the manuscript of Finding Time Again, Proust never in fact found time to revise the final volume of the novel for publication before his death on November 18 1922. And then he rewrote many of them, driving a succession of publishers to distraction with his interminable and illegible revisions. He wrote most of the novel's 3,000 pages at the dead of night, propped up in bed over his notebooks or, when he was too ill to hold the pen himself, dictating to his long-suffering cook, Céleste Albaret. By the time the first volume appeared in 1913, his severe asthma, together with a number of affiliated nervous ailments, mostly prevented him from venturing beyond the cork-soundproofed bedroom of his apartment at 102 Boulevard Haussmann (now preserved in the Musée de Carnavalet in Paris). ![]() When Proust started work on the novel, probably in 1908, he was in his late 30s and an incorrigible socialite, better known for having fought a duel with a reviewer (who had - entirely accurately - insinuated that he was a homosexual) than for his meagre literary accomplishments. ![]() I n Search of Lost Time is one of the miracles of European literature - and it's a miracle it ever got written. ![]()
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