Life is too short, and Proust is too long. — Anatole France (likely apocryphal)
With La Prisonnière (The Captive or The Prisoner), Proust’s literary epic takes an unfortunate behind-the-scenes turn (you can find all of my Proust articles here). The author had died in 1922, before he could finish the editing and revision of the last three volumes. It is one of those great literary tragedies that we can never truly reconstruct the climaxes of his work, even if a century of scholarly pursuit has at least brought us closer to understanding the intentions behind them. The Captive, published in 1923, is, if anything, all the more fascinating because of this, but unfortunately I think it is a noticeable step down from the previous four volumes.
Giving this book a star rating seems like an exercise in absurdity. At his heights here, Proust’s writing remains a rhapsody of social discovery, with scythe-like descriptions of people from all works of life (the social-climbing Madame Verdurin and the simple, superstitious Françoise have nothing in common except that they are perhaps the two most delightful character sketches in all of the Recherche) and utterly gorgeous reflections on the challenges of creating art, and the responsibility of artists to the greater society. There is less humour than in the previous volumes, due to the narrator’s agonised state, but…
