Time Regained

Marcel Proust’s monumental seven-part In Search of Lost Time is considered by many to be the greatest novel of the twentieth century. In Time Regained, the final volume, edited and annotated by noted Proust scholar William C. Carter, Proust brilliantly resolves the novel’s main themes: love and jealousy, grief and oblivion, time and memory, and the purpose of art and literature. Among the famous passages is the “masked ball” in which the Narrator, after a long absence from society, attends a party at the Prince de Guermantes’s and at first fails to recognize his old acquaintances because of the changes wrought by the passage of time. The concluding pages, in which the Narrator recovers his will and discovers the subject matter of his future book, contain many observations about life and art that will remain in our memories.

For Time Regained, Carter uses the translation by Andreas Mayor, a successor to the translations of the previous volumes by Charles Kenneth Scott Moncrieff, who died before finishing this volume.