Abridged Rechercher: An Abridgement Of La Recherche Du Temps Perdu

by Steve Bachmann

Abridged Rechercher ABRIDGED RECHERCHER is an abridgement of Marcel Proust's masterwork La Recherche du Temps Perdu (a.k.a. In Search of Lost Time). Figures ranging from Samuel Beckett to Henry James to Proust's publisher to Proust's reviewers have found Proust's multi-volume novel hard to begin, hard to finish, and hard to read (“gobble-gobble discharge,” “inconceivable boredom,” “a ragbag,” "unreadable”). And people have found Proust's novel to be long. Very long. As Viv Groskop has observed, “People do not read his work from start to finish. They just don't.” By reducing the original novel's over a million words to some 125,000 words, this new translation hopes to encourage readers to discover Proust, and ultimately delve further into Proust. This abridgement follows the essentials of Proust's plot, where an aspiring writer tries to find out through the course of his life whether or not he has something worth writing about. (He does, and it may mean the end of civilization as we know it.) This abridgement's sentences follow the order in which they are presented in Proust's original text. To further assist the reader, this abridgement provides orienting information concerning dates, money values, historical incidents, and translation nuances. An opening introduction provides the reader with a context to Proust's landmark classic.

285 pages, Kindle Edition

Published June 12, 2022