“Admittedly, even before she had decided in favor of virtue, in the age of uncertainty, she had a pronounced predilection for soldiers”: Between love, especially the forbidden, and war, there is already a tangible one in Marcel Proust’s earliest stories Connection. The partly fragmentary stories, which have only now appeared under the title “The mysterious letter writer”, Proust has sorted out from his published works. Perhaps because they are still too unprocessed to negotiate “the emotional and moral problem of homosexuality”, as the editor Luc Fraisse writes. Or because they have a strong experimental character, which the comments in the German edition reflect well.
Marcel Proust: The mysterious letter writer. Early narratives. Translated from the French by Bernd Schwibs. Suhrkamp, Berlin 2021. 174 pages, 24 euros.
Although there is hardly anything else that Proust wrote that is unknown, a small island ribbon brings a charming side to light. Some “letters to his neighbor” show how the extremely sensitive to noise poet in letters to Marie Williams, the wife of an American dentist who lived and worked in the apartment above him, on the third floor of Boulevard Haussmann 102, solved the problem through storms of affection and tried to solve paradoxical interventions: “Madame, I thank you from the bottom of my heart for your beautiful and amiable letter and, on the contrary, would like to ask you to allow all possible noise from now on Would prevent trying to sleep. “
Marcel Proust: Letters to his neighbor. Translated from the French by Bernd Schwibs. With an essay by Andreas Maier. Insel, Berlin 2021. 112 pages, 14 euros.
We also know the private Proust through the stories of his housekeeper Céleste Albaret, whom she put on record decades after his death. She was present on November 18, 1922 when Marcel Proust died. Your memories have now been reissued.
Monsieur Proust. The memories of his housekeeper Céleste Albaret. Recorded by Georges Belmont. Translated from the French by Margaret Carroux. Kampa, Zurich 2021. 540 pages, 34 euros.
One of the main characters in Proust’s life was Reynaldo Hahn, whom he met in Madame Lemaire’s salon. What probably started as a love affair became a lifelong friendship. The Italian journalist Lorenza Foschini writes about this in “And the wind blows through our souls”. The correspondence between Hahn and Proust published in 2018 (edited by Bernd-Jürgen Fischer. Reclam, 574 pages, 68 euros) contains the ups and downs of this stormy relationship: “Unseliger, you don’t understand the daily and evening fights in which I am alone fear holds back from causing you pain. “
Lorenza Foschini: And the wind blows through our souls. Marcel Proust and Reynaldo Hahn. A story of love and friendship. Translated from the Italian by Peter Klöss. Nagel & Kimche, Munich 2021. 237 pages, 22 euros.
Marcel Proust’s world and his works can hardly be thwarted today without a guide. Bernd-Jürgen Fischer has now obtained an “Album in Pictures and Texts” which explains important people, places and events in Proust’s life and shows in quotations where their images and shadows can be found in novels and letters.
Bernd-Jürgen Fischer: In search of Marcel Proust. An album in pictures and texts. Reclam, Ditzingen 2020. 224 pages, 28 euros.
The “Proust-ABC” by the romanist Ulrike Sprenger is also a reader in its own right. It has now been reissued and lists the lemmas of a literary life from “Abraham” and “Académie française” to “Zeit, verlorene” and “Zimmer”. One should read that, writes Alexander Kluge in the foreword “like a map 1: 300,000, in maps of this scale the general staff and directors of the events immerse themselves in a serious war”. War metaphors are obviously not far when it comes to Proust.
Ulrike Sprenger: The Proust ABC. With a foreword by Alexander Kluge. Reclam, Ditzingen 2021. 317 pages, 20 euros.
And one of the earliest Proust introductions is back: Ernst Robert Curtius had corresponded with the poet himself. The dimensions of the work and the effect were not yet fully recognizable, when he was already trying to bring them to the German-speaking readership: “The effect of his spirit is spreading daily,” he wrote in 1925, now Schöffling-Verlag has the essay again hung up.
Ernst Robert Curtius: Marcel Proust. With an afterword by Michael Kleeberg. Schöffling, Frankfurt am Main 2021. 198 pages, 24 euros.
Jürgen Ritte makes a precious piece of the Marcel Proust universe very accessible. Jean Giraudoux, a writer ten years his junior whom Proust admired, drew a series of generations of French literature around the First World War in an article entitled “Du côté de chez Marcel Proust” in 1919. The autograph of this essay is now published in facsimile, transcribed, commented and edited in two languages. All this although Marcel Proust was so unhappy with the article itself: “a big disappointment for me”.
Jean Giraudoux: In Marcel Proust’s world. You côté de chez Marcel Proust. Edited by Jürgen Ritte. Friedenauer Presse, Berlin 2021. 64 pages, 25 euros.