Skip to content

Le Temps retrouvé

Le Temps retrouvé

ClassicsLiterary Fiction
Pages
324
Published
1927
Language
English

Synopsis

Le Temps retrouvé (Time Regained) is the concluding volume of Marcel Proust's monumental novel, À la recherche du temps perdu. It brings the narrator's journey of memory and self-discovery to a profound close, as he grapples with the passage of time, the nature of art, and the meaning of his own life. This volume culminates the exploration of society, love, and the power of involuntary memory.

Prose complexity
10/10

Collected in

Book cover of À la recherche du temps perdu
À la recherche du temps perdu

Vibe

MelancholicNostalgicReflectivePhilosophical
Coming of AgeFamily SagaUnreliable Narrator

Genres

Classics Literary Fiction

About the author

M
Marcel Proust

Marcel Proust — in full Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust — was a French novelist, literary critic and essayist, born on 10 July 1871 in Auteuil, on the western edge of Paris. He suffered from asthma from childhood. As a young man he moved in fashionable Parisian society and published criticism, short pieces and French translations of John Ruskin (La Bible d'Amiens and Sésame et les lys); from around 1897 his declining health drew him steadily out of social life, and he spent his final...

Characters

Gilberte SwannSupporting

Now married to Robert de Saint-Loup; the volume opens with the narrator's visit to her at Tansonville, and she is scarcely recognisable when he meets her again years later.

Baron de CharlusSupporting

Aged and isolated during the war, holding pro-German sympathies amid wartime hostility; the narrator discovers him frequenting a masochistic hotel run by Jupien.

Madame de GuermantesSupporting

The Duchesse de Guermantes; is unexpectedly and deeply affected by Robert de Saint-Loup's death.

Madame VerdurinSupporting

Formerly the bourgeois hostess of "the little clan"; has risen through remarriage to become the Princesse de Guermantes.

Odette de CrécySupporting

Now Madame de Forcheville; at the Guermantes reception the narrator observes that, unlike everyone else, she appears untouched by age.

All characters in Le Temps retrouvé