What can say a Proustian neophyte of such a monument, if not try to convey his encouragement to those who still hesitate to take the plunge? Very useful is the exciting preface by Antoine Companion to this edition. Y is exposed Proust's ambition to offer demonstration, initially planned as a single volume, "Contre Sainte-Beuve," the superiority of the sensitive reasoned, the preponderance of the unconscious self on voluntary me (like what theories Freudian were much of their time!). By exposing us the history of the project with its hesitations, additions, carvings, and belatedly discovered process that will give the whole a consistent time search architecture and unity a posteriori (the narrator remembers to be remembered) in addition to justify the statement of his feelings and reflections on memory and his reminiscences, reminds us of the difficulties and rebuffs the publication became a colossal text: this introduction is a good appetizer, prior to a banquet deemed indigestible . Its genesis and its justification and asked, we can attack calmly, sedately, grain by grain, this formidable mountain caviar, fabulous incipit novel without a huge plot that gradually familiarizes us with a famous and feared style. A mix of short and endless phrases we will be pleased to resume as soon as we replay a complex melody, virtuoso formulations: it is a piece of jewelry, the details of the microscope we travel, aided by such famous inventive metaphors, poetic up to sentimentality. The decor of Combray slowly planted, the characters who live there and their behavior and dissected uncompromising player and heated and tamed, comes the reward of the second part: the description of a passionate love. The analysis of the phenomenon, its unlikely birth to her withering through a beautifully husked crescendo; the sharpness of the study of personalities and characters of the protagonists and their worldly surroundings, so initiated at the beginning of the volume; the description of the most intimate feelings, sentimental as artistic (a tad outdated and delightfully demonstrative); decryption transport through music "language of the unspeakable", all in round trips, field and field-cons; the description of inconsistencies, cowardice, denials, denials, reversals sentimental: it is breathtaking. Everything is said, and how! Without a more daring attempt to align a word and judging definitively any unnecessary reading, if not later!
