Proust
In the twentieth century Marcel Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu came to be regarded by many as a definitive roman fleuve. Today, however, its seven volumes are generally considered to be a single novel. In some serious sense, it escapes classification.
Proust's work was immensely influential, particularly on British novelists of the middle of the twentieth century who did not favour modernism. Some of those follow the example of Anthony Powell, a Proust disciple, but consciously adapting the technique to depict social change, rather than change in high society. This was a step beyond the realist novels of Arnold Bennett (the Clayhanger books) or John Galsworthy.
Read more about this topic: Novel Sequence
Famous quotes containing the word proust:
“Let us be grateful to people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.”
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)
“And this disease that was Swann’s love had so multiplied, it was so intimately tied to all of Swann’s habits, to all his acts, to his thoughts, to his health, to his sleep, to his life, even to what he desired for his afterlife, his love was so much a part of him that it could not be extracted from him without destroying him entirely: as is said in surgery, his love was inoperable.”
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)
“I was able to believe for years that going to Madame Swann’s was a vague chimera that I would never attain; after having passed a quarter of an hour there, it was the time at which I did not know her which became to me a chimera and vague, as a possible destroyed by another possible.”
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)