A Reader's Guide to Proust's In Search of Lost Time

David Ellison. A Reader's Guide to Proust's In Search of Lost Time. Cambridge, Cambridge UP: 2010. 228 pages.

David Ellison's newest book will most likely draw comparisons to two other "guides" to Proust's magnum opus, Patrick Alexander's Marcel Proust's Search for Lost Time: A Reader's Guide to The Remembrance of Things Past and Roger Shattuck's Proust's Way: A Field Guide to In Search of Lost Time. Ellison, however, quickly distinguishes himself, focusing "on the immediate experience of reading Proust, word by word, line by line" (ix). One expects to open Alexander's book at particular points of the Recherche: the introduction of a curious new character or, for summary, at the end of a particularly intense episode or chapter. In many ways, this makes Alexander's book more a useful reference than a reader's guide. Likewise, many readers would open Shattuck's book when they have finally closed the Recherche, looking for over-arching themes throughout the novel. Ellison's, in contrast, is to be opened simultaneously with Pléiade's 1987-89 edition of the Recherche (or Penguin's new collection of translations by Lydia Davis, et al. which Ellison quotes in tandem with the French, the only of the three "guides" to use the newer translations, rather than the Kilmartin-Montcrieff-Enright translations). Rather than offering a plot summary, like Alexander's introductory "What Happens in Proust," Ellison's book attempts to "emulate Virgil to [the] reader's Dante, and disappear once he has pointed out salient areas of the landscape, leaving the more arduous, but also more rewarding stages of the peregrination to the literary pilgrim" (x).

As a guide, it therefore accompanies the reader in the chronology...