Yanagihara ( The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”-deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. (Volume 4, Sodom and Gomorrah, will appear in fall 2004).įour men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions-as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer-and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives. Scott-Moncrieff’s first English translation.īut whatever your preference, Proust is a pleasure no serious reader should miss. The colloquial accents of Treharne’s lucid English version illuminate such contrasts in ways perhaps not quite managed by the stately cadences of C.K. But Proust’s swirling sentences and echoing emphases vividly counterpoint such concerns with the literate glamour embodied by the mercurial Duchesse de Guermantes, the willful egoism of brilliant, unstable actress Rachel, and the suave amorality incarnated in (Proust’s most memorable monster) homosexual Baron Charlus. Marcel’s old life still beckons, in the earthy impertinence of his family’s longtime servant Francoise, and in the agonizingly slow dying of his beloved grandmother.

Volume three of the newly commissioned translation by various hands of Proust’s masterpiece (based on the authoritative 1987–89 French text) traces his autobiographical protagonist Marcel’s conflicted continued entry into the worlds of Parisian high society.

The latest in the adventurous and expert new edition of In Search of Lost Time (see Jan.

The guermantes way