Product Description

In "The Captive Part I", Marcel's obsessive love for Albertine makes her virtually a captive in his Paris apartment. This set of three cassettes continues the Naxos Audiobooks Proust cycle, following on from the last title in the series "Sodom and Gomorrah Part II."

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1722224 in Books
• Published on: 2000-03
• Format: Abridged
• Original language: English
• Binding: Audio Cassette

From Amazon.com
Marcel Proust whiled away the first half of his life as a self-conscious aesthete and social climber. The second half he spent in the creation of the mighty roman-fleuve that is Remembrance of Things Past, memorializing his own dandyism and parvenu hijinks even as he revealed their essential hollowness. Proust begins, of course, at the beginning--with the earliest childhood perceptions and sorrows. Then, over several thousand pages, he retraces the course of his own adolescence and adulthood, democratically dividing his experiences among the narrator and a sprawling cast of characters. Who else has ever decanted life into such ornate, knowing, wrought-iron sentences? Who has subjected love to such merciless microscopy, discriminating between the tiniest variations of desire and self-delusion? Who else has produced a grief-stricken record of time's erosion that can also make you laugh for entire pages? The answer to all these questions is: nobody.

From School Library Journal
Adult/High School-In 1998, French cartoonist Heuet began a planned 12-volume project to recast Marcel Proust's opus as a full-color graphic novel. This second in the series to be translated into English continues the story of a young man so sensitive to his surroundings that even the memory of scents and tastes fills his thoughts and colors his health. He accompanies his grandmother to the seaside at Balbec, eagerly anticipating the drama of the waves he imagines can be viewed from the 12th-century church, but resigned to a lengthy stay at a tourist hotel where the concept of social class takes on a nearly gladiatorial pitch. Heuet's illustrations key in to the newness of electric lighting, the frivolity of fashions, and the rigidity of correct facial expressions and postures. Both narrative frames and speech bubbles are studded with Proustian turns of phrase. While certainly no substitute for the original, the book offers a wealth of period and aesthetic detail that will delight artists and readers.
Francisca Goldsmith, Berkeley Public Library, CA
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From AudioFile
Neville Jason strives for clarity and succeeds with distinction. Proust spent more than a decade cloistered in his sickbed, writing his massive, autobiographical novel, or rather, series of novels, In Search of Lost Time. In this volume, published posthumously in 1923, our hero Marcel remembers his obsessive affair with Albertine, whom he sequesters in his Paris flat. Naxos is publishing the entire oeuvre narrated by the indefatigable Neville Jason. No one could undertake such a job thoroughly without decades of preparation. Judging by this, the actor has put in plenty of time, even abridging the text himself. As reader he has a fine voice and excellent technique. He strives for clarity--not an easy job considering some of the author's page-long sentences--and succeeds with distinction. If the resonances at times elude him--well, they elude a lot of people. What he has achieved is well worth hearing. And he deserves plaudits for the sheer chutzpah of taking this job on. Y.R. Winner of AUDIOFILE Earphones Award © AudioFile 2001, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine

Customer Reviews

Providing a new and absorbing perspective
Remembrance Of Things Past, Volume One: Within A Budding Grove is the first in what will be a 12-14 volume English-language graphic novel adaptation of the introspective French literary work by Marcel Proust. The simple, full-color artwork of Stephane Heuet paints the characters in a style reminiscent of Tintin, bringing to life the world and thoughts housed in Proust's immortal pages. Remembrance Of Things Past: With A Budding Grove is very highly recommended as providing a new and absorbing perspective on a worthy literary classic.

Read all the reviews here-they're all right on!!
I read this entire opus in the summer of 1975, while lounging around the local pool and tennis courts, as a young seeker of wisdom and truth. I had read Mann (MAGIC MOUNTAIN),Musil (MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES), WAS AMAZED, GAVE THIS ONE A SHOT. A lot is very slow going,but it's true this is a book that really makes you appreciate beauty, and frankly be glad that you (I) have eyes and ears. Most people, it seems, go thru life without really bothering to appreciate the everyday beauties that are all around us,corny as that seems. Walk around your neighborhood some evening.How many people will be strolling outside enchanted at the the stars/heavens? For every one,there are probably a thousand watching an obnoxious sit-com with canned laughter. You see, a great artist like Proust makes us look at the world in this way. Walk into even a do-it-yourself clothing shop,and notice all the patterns. Most of us barely pay attention. Proust' ways of seeing,and describing are like any great painter. He often invokes Vermeer, a fair comparison.He is awed by cathedrals,landscapes,you name it. And his discussions of the Great War, including some admiration for German soldiers, are a surprise. Yes, it goes on and on,and I could not make the effort now,except to browse thru it. BTW, I prefer Mann and Musil, who seem to have a better story line,and stringer narrative. Marcel's mother complex,and all the super-long interrelationships and descriptions may put you off, for good reason,but even just browsing thru this shows you this fellow had phenomenal powers of observation,even forgetting all the rest of the greatness of this wondrous, if boring at times, work of art.

Number 53--pourquois pas?
Yes, one more review of this monster, only because I have some different views on a few of its features. But first, to reinforce what others have written, it's a tremendously satisfying read. I read it twenty years ago and am now almost finished for the second time. I picked it up again because I was so tired of flailing around looking for something worthwhile to read--with all the jillions of books out there, the number of truly rewarding ones is remarkably small.

But it's amazing how different the experience is the second time around. The first time, I was so completely enchanted by the style alone, and gave my concentration to it so completely, that I missed a lot of the "story" (if it could be said to have one). Now I'm beginning to think that that is part of Proust's enormous joke on the reader.

Here is a narrator who succeeds wonderfully in rendering every character in his story--every character, that is, except himself. Even his girlfriends--given what we now know about Proust's having modelled them after men he was obsessed with--come across as quite believable females, even if they are a bit hazy around the edges compared with, say, the vibrant and robust portrait of Robert de Saint-Loup that fairly leaps from the page. And in Mme Verdurin and Baron de Charlus he creates two of the great characters--the great people--of all literature. But he fails to create a believable person in his narrator! For despite the narrator's claims that his company is ardently and constantly sought by everyone from soldiers in their barracks to dukes and duchesses in their drawing rooms, he never--NEVER, in the course of thousands of pages--gives us one instance of his wit or charm when interacting with others. In fact, he impresses one as a rather repulsive little creep, neurotic and neurasthenic in the extreme, and rather cruel. This is not to say that he fails to be witty and charming as a narrator--far from it. First of all, there are the marvelous characters mentioned above. And if the reader can somehow weather the tedious, meticulous, seemingly endless analyses of his "love" for Gilberte and, even more remorselessly, for Albertine, one encounters passages of great lyric beauty, sentences that are entrancingly serpentine, metaphors stunningly original and transitions masterfully seamless.