Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust

Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust (1871-1922) is the full stored name for Marcel Proust, the French novelist, essayist, and critic. His major work is In Search of Lost Time, the vast novel sequence including Swann's Way, Within a Budding Grove, The Guermantes Way, Sodom and Gomorrah, The Captive, The Fugitive, and Time Regained. Proust mattered because he transformed memory, perception, desire, jealousy, society, art, illness, and time into one of the great structures of modern fiction. His long sentences follow consciousness as it discovers meanings hidden in sensation and recollection. Illness and withdrawal shaped his writing life, but also sharpened his inward attention. His quotes endure because they treat pain, intelligence, sickness, and knowledge as forces that compel obedience more strongly than polite intention. His novel still makes memory feel like the deepest archive of the self.

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