The Complete Short Stories of Marcel Proust

by Marcel Proust, Joachim Neugroschel (Translator)

Proust is developing into one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century. This new collection contains his first literary endeavor, "Pleasures and Days," translated into English for the first time in 50 years, along with six additional stories, never before seen in English.

Critiquing Proust's early stories is like appraising Picasso's four-year-old napkin drawings. There are subtle hints of brilliance, but these callow stories pale in comparison to his enigmatic opus, Remembrance of Things Past. Both works share the glitzy backdrop of Parisian high society and tiptoe through the same topics: addressing vanity, investigating the validity of sexual mores, and pondering the impact of sickness on life. Separated by 17 years, these juvenile tales set the thematic and stylistic table for the unique feast of Proust's mature work.

Delicately translated by Neugroschel, the prolific three-time PEN Award winner, these early musings are priceless, insightful venturing into the mind of a maturing virtuoso. This book is a must for inclusive fiction collections.

This volume gathers together all of Marcel Proust's short fiction and six tales never before translated into English.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Classics, France, French Literature, Literature, Short Story Collection

201 pages, Paperback

First published April 3, 2001

About the author

Marcel Proust was a French novelist, best known for his 3000 page masterpiece À la recherche du temps perdu (Remembrance of Things Past or In Search of Lost Time), a pseudo-autobiographical novel told mostly in a stream-of-consciousness style.

Born in the first year of the Third Republic, the young Marcel, like his narrator, was a delicate child from a bourgeois family. He was active in Parisian high society during the 80s and 90s, welcomed in the most fashionable and exclusive salons of his day. However, his position there was also one of an outsider, due to his Jewishness and homosexuality. Towards the end of 1890s Proust began to withdraw more and more from society, and although he was never entirely reclusive, as is sometimes made out, he lapsed more completely into his lifelong tendency to sleep during the day and work at night. He was also plagued with severe asthma, which had troubled him intermittently since childhood, and a terror of his own death, especially in case it should come before his novel had been completed. The first volume, after some difficulty finding a publisher, came out in 1913, and Proust continued to work with an almost inhuman dedication on his masterpiece right up until his death in 1922, at the age of 51.

Today he is widely recognized as one of the greatest authors of the 20th Century, and À la recherche du temps perdu as one of the most dazzling and significant works of literature to be written in modern times.

Reviews

[Seemita · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mezzanine.
That is where my soul lies right now.
Elevated, with the soft avalanche of rippling visions,
erupting from the nubile eyes of a young Proust, from a lowly level that
seethed with diminished dignity and blackened clarity
to a mezzanine level, worthy of a corner seat
in a giant hall of evolved consciousness.

Analysing discarded memories from the forgotten boxes,
left lying beneath unpleasant mounds of soiled fates and muddy losses,
had seldom turned so aromatic an episode, so imminent an occurrence.
Like a foreigner, unknowingly leaving his secret trail in a new land,
Proust suspends slings from the trees of solitude and
provides levers for the uneven roads of melancholy
for the subsequent travellers to embrace,
a road that is guiding rather than deflecting.

Rising from sundered love and falling in unrequited one,
can bear the laurel of bright crimson, he says,
if one refuses to corrode the vial into which the rejection flows
and uphold its skill and tenderness to tend to a sapling anew.
Incidentally, love never vanishes.
It just finds another home.
And it could be ours if we keep the doors open.

Clinging to nature when the season within, wither away
and opening the balustrades of will to absorb the bounty outside,
is one of the treasured practice of a beating heart.
One may never fathom the gurgling but the streams of life,
from every cloud to every leaf-blade, comes rushing
into the boroughs of a pained being,
finding the most contused corners and
healing them with incomparable patience
and ushering in a memorable convalescence.

Eulogizing absence is no crime, he tells me aloud,
for existence of this little chap fills the room.
It is in this fella’s appearances that one discovers meanings,
alluding to our deepest darlings and abhorred devils.
A supreme leveller that brings everything to one plain
and seeing things in clear light becomes the only way to be.

Loftily holding pity has never found a fertile endorsement,
if all it does is direct pompous vacuum into a promising mind. But
given a chance to extend it as a resurgent mirror to a discoloured soul,
never turn away from holding the hinges as tightly as you can.
He repeats it with a tearing urgency.
Pity should always appear in a positive veil,
just visible to ring in its presence
but never portentous enough to inveigle dilution and lose its purpose.

Pantomiming the faces of jealousy, he shot a wave of dereliction;
shot across all that was good on the stage
and all good falling prey to the obnoxious wave of embittered emotions.
My awareness of jealousy as an aberration,
intended to be excluded in all human equation notwithstanding,
it was in Proust’s rousing enacting that I saw it in another avatar.
Jealousy, you would never be a hero.

Rummaging through the yardsticks of success,
should I ever find a prodigy winning over years of education,
I should not fret. Proust is clear about it.
For prodigious potions have limits, education has none.
Nor does it matter at the end
when life accounts are settled in isolation.

Onerous are those tears that trickle without reason
and privileged are those that trickle with it.
Knowing what to preserve and what to silence,
is knowing what to live for and what not to.
At the sight of their coalescence, he tells me,
aim straight for its source;
not what is visible but what is being hidden in those eyes.
Yes, that’s the key.

Under the rustic umbrella of life, should there be a sign of the end
And if death comes as a beating, torrential rain;
You can merrily choose to let go of that umbrella
if you have learnt to splash the waters under it.
Perhaps the highs of life that sat atop the clouds
and the blizzard of colors that brushed the trees
were hitherto invisible, hidden under the clout of this umbrella.

Summing up the emotional bandwagon of living
and the intellectual thinning of being,
Proust left me with a solstice of iridescent vantage within whose lips,
many questions rose and fell with ferocious equanimity
and their answers lurked in assured vanity,
and I swam with an induced current which kept me afloat,
a little sunk and a little tethered.

Told as an early teacher, garnished with an inexperienced eye,
the notes I made at the end of his class
seemed nothing short of a phenomenal ally.
Truth be told, I sail into another year
holding tightly to his incandescent thoughts, to steer clear.

[Lesle · Rating 4 out of 5]

Proust's Short Stories is his work from his Juvenilia days. The work includes Paris' high society with some pretentious social climbers, jealousy, airs and some loss as well. His style in this work is almost child like, and what he is surrounded by, making for an easy read and each story is different with emotions of loneliness, sadness of his characters that are well described.

The first story The Death of Baldassare Silvande can bring tears. Alexis, the nephew, visits his sick uncle on his birthday, Silvande gives him a horse and promises to give him another horse and a carriage later. Alexis receives the gifts. You realize that Silvande does not expect to live out the year, as his health deteriorates, he is able to reflect on his life and his relationships.
In A Young Girl’s Confession, she is driven to suicide when her many relations causes her mothers death. She has a lack of will. "One must never allow evil the tiniest nook"
A Dinner in High Society is just that! Banker, Literature expertise and Beauty, charm and lover of life.

Overall a read that I enjoyed. Not sure I will take on the challenge of Remembrance of Things Past soon.

[BAM doesn’t answer to her real name · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars
Proust takes a simple dinner invitation, a trip to the Alps, an accident with a runaway horse, etc and links it to love. Love, then, becomes a tragic entity in the subject's life, as if it cannot be lived without it, yet cannot be survived through it. Nothing and no one is safe.
I appreciated the length of the stories; these are truly short stories, the plot not suffering from lack of pages. True artistry

[Barb · Rating 2 out of 5]

The Foreword and Preface of this edition help understand a bit about Marcel Proust and his style. I found the translation very readable. The stories and snippets show characters caught in a society where appearances and social networks are all that matter. I frequently skimmed over passages that were too convoluted or had references I could not understand. Marcel Proust wrote in French around 1900, so perhaps that accounts for some of my troubles. While some of the passages were engaging, I failed to feel connected, either sympathetically or antagonistically, to the characters. Reading these stories was like looking through a terrarium or snow globe -- everything happening seemed far away, untouchable, and passingly interesting.

[Paul H. · Rating 2 out of 5]

Impressively bad, actually quite similar to Joyce's Stephen Hero, which is so maudlin and underwhelming that it just seems impossible that Joyce could have written it.

It's clearer to me, now, why it took most of Proust's contemporaries a couple decades to fully appreciate À la recherche -- they only knew Proust as the dilettante-ish dandy who had written these stories.

[J.M. Hushour · Rating 3 out of 5]

Yep, Marcel comin'. I'm angling for that mega reread of Proust's giant whatever-you-want-to-call-it, novel, pastwank. I thought I'd prepare by reading this little volume of Proust's short stories. Right? Proust? Short stories? Impossible! Nay, I say. He did write some. All of his output wasn't gargantuan, pickled metaphor novelistic onanism.
These aren't bad. Like the introduction says, you can see his "style" developing, these are little slivers of prose airlifted right out of "Things Past" and they share many of the same themes and, to their credit, are funnier than you'd think. I'd say about half are pretty great, some of the others are too brief and too thin-veined to feel like Proust.

[E.J. Cullen · Rating 2 out of 5]

I had to read Proust's "Remembrance of Things Past" in college, and stumbled and grumbled through it. Thinking I must have missed something, I picked up this, his 'compete stories.' So far, he's aggravating me again.

[Everett · Rating 5 out of 5]

Proust saved my life.

[Greg · Rating 3 out of 5]

Here, we find two sets of stories: 1) Pleasure and Days -published in 1896 and 2) Earlier Stories.
There are lovely passages in both sections, and if you've read "Search for Lost time" (I've read almost all of them. you'll encounter scenes which are expanded upon in this author's mega-master work. Here, he awaits his mother's kisses before bedtime, or waits for a lovers continued and many '"goodnights", again before bedtime, both having rather lengthy, and often breathtaking passages in "Time." But within this collection, we do find traces of Hugo and Dumas, over-the-top romances such as: "I tell you irresistibly I cannot live without you. It is your presence that gives my life that fine, warm, melancholy hue, like the pearls that spend the night on your body...if you did not keep me close to you, I would die." An older Proust, working on "Time" does write beautiful lines, but I don't recall any in which I would classify as overly romantic from the 19th century's style of writing. And this was a surprise (a good one) when he writes: " During my sixteenth year I suffered a crisis that left me sickly. To divert me, my family had me debut in society. Young men got into the habit of calling on me." What? That's a statement that's never made in "Time": I turned back a few pages and noticed the title of the piece was "A Young Girl's Confession" . Other than the "debut" issue, this might be very true (or at least a fantasy: as a young man he may indeed have many men calling on him, but not necessarily of a sexual nature.) The oddest sections here are the short discussions of Painters (Alfred Cuyp, Paulus Potter, Anthony van Dyck, and more) then portraits of Composers (Chopin, Gluck, Mozart and more,) all of which feel like biographical entries. The best parts are toward the end of this book, in which Proust ruminates on death, which he has felt and seen and knew about all his life (he had asthma from childhood through adulthood and that was the cause of his death. ) He seems more open and honest here than anywhere else within these pages, and also more honest with the asthma issue here than during the writing of the final parts of "Time."
Summary: I enjoyed this book but found it uneven. The essays on artists may have been "practice" and the Hugoesque overly romantic lines are, well, done away with by the time the author writes the brilliant "Swan's Way" which to me was so beautiful I read two translations in succession. So, when I read the last volume of "In Search of Lost Time" I'll read the entire work via a different translation and will find new ways to see the world. Proust is one of a handful of truly brilliant artists, up there with Bach, Michelangelo, and others.

[Phrodrick slowed his growing backlog · Rating 3 out of 5]

I can only recommend The Complete Short Stories of Marcel Proust as a historic literary document. For those of us who want to read a great writer before they achieve their mature style this book could be a text book. We have several themes that Proust will develop in his most magnum of all opus, Reembrace of Things Past. We have the love ‘em by avoiding them, lots of class envy and snobbery, even mauve will appear. Although, here mauve here is a color of water and not of a young girl’s completion. The former seems reasonable the later, like maybe she is dying.

There are ample examples of the younger writer in all his certainty that between himself and his elders, he is the wiser. He can distain the upper class, what would have been called, Le gratin, but he also loves them. There are several stories on the theme that one can either live the high life, and therefore be useless or one can live humbly and therefor be good. A surprise for some readers of the À la Recherche, Proust can be brief.

Much of this book reads more like a notebook. An idea may spread across a page or three. A few will stretch into few more pages. Some read like little more than a disregarded notion, yet all seem to be completed stories.

At just over 200 pages, this should be a few hours read. Because I was frustrated by the young author’s presumption, and encouraged by the clear signs of what was to come, I stretched it out. Certain I would leave it a DNR and just as sure that in one stretch I could knock it out.

[Jim Richardson · Rating 4 out of 5]

I would prefer to rate this volume at 3.5. As the individual stories are not joined with any theme, other than possibly the termination of relationships, there are some common phrases that often occur. “The breeze blended the three smells of sea, wet leaves, and milk.” Some of the terminations are due to the death of a person, and the author evokes some strong feelings in those passages.

There are also so very gentle passages that are remarkable in depth of detail. His description of our memories as Dutch paintings in which the people are caught in very simple moments of their lives wherein their charm lies in the naturalness of the figures and the simplicity of the scene.

Overall a very relaxing work to read.

[Nicole Lannertone · Rating 4 out of 5]

He captures feelings that I would never have known how to describe. I felt the description click into place as my mind accepted the marriage of his words and my exact sentiment. A taste on the tip of your tongue, the feelings that blur- unnameable- when music hits your ears, melancholy in all its effects, and love; if that can even be described.

[Josh Brown · Rating 4 out of 5]

Overall good and reminds me how great In Search of Lost Time is. The highlight was definitely “The End of Jealousy.” These stories (though divergent in style) hang together but on the first reading I could only tell that they did, but not how.

[Cecilia Barron · Rating 3 out of 5]

He's obviously a good writer, but some of these were so tough. Like the fragments of thoughts included in this were hard to stomach. Other stories were brilliant though. He's really obsessed with love and suicide and mothers.

[Christopher Calcara · Rating 4 out of 5]

If for no other reason, this was definitely worth the read for its beautiful language.

[saudade · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5

[Christine · Rating 5 out of 5]

Daydreamers of the world, unite and take over.

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fiction A-Z Book 'P': The Complete Short Stories of Marcel Proust

"A fashionable milieu is one in which each person's opinion is made up of everyone else's opinions. Does each opinion run counter to everyone else's? Then it is a literary milieu." --Marcel Proust 'Fragments of Commedia Dell'Arte'

So...now I've read some Proust. Where do I apply for my literary pretension merit badge? :)

But, in all honesty, I was pretty surprised by this collection. I was expecting something dry and more than a little dull. And while there were some stilted sections (which I'm sure read better to an 1890's French reader's eye), overall I greatly enjoyed the experience. You can see here that Proust, even as a young writer, had great insight into human nature and into the culture he lived in. The stories are funny, clever, sensual, and often full of beautiful turns of phrase.

My favorites in the collection were "The Death of Baldassare Silvande, Viscount of Sylvania"; "A Dinner in High Society"; "The Melancholy Summer of Madame de Breyves", and sections of "Regrets, Reveries the Color of Time" (especially 'Friendship' and 'In Praise of Bad Music')

[Carolyn · Rating 2 out of 5]

A collection which wanders through short stories, observations, diaristic sketches and back to stories again. Published when Proust was 25 in a translation that captures the irony and delicate Rococo of the original French. In context it is a remarkable book. I found it best to skim some passages, the stories being by far the best parts.

[Oakley · Rating 3 out of 5]

He must be a good writer to make me care about the personal problems of spoiled French aristocrats. His style is cool and algebraic; all the characters could all just be called x,y or z.