The Fugitive

Written by Marcel Proust

Narrated by Neville Jason

Remembrance of Things Past is one of the monuments of 20th-century literature. Neville Jason’s unabridged recording of the work runs to 150 hours.
The Fugitive is the sixth of seven volumes. The Narrator's obsessive feelings of possession for Albertine have forced her to flee. It comes as a terrible shock and is followed by further destabilising news about other friends.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Naxos Audiobooks
• Release date: Oct 1, 2012
• ISBN: 9781843796152

Marcel Proust

Marcel Proust (1871-1922) was a French novelist. Born in Auteuil, France at the beginning of the Third Republic, he was raised by Adrien Proust, a successful epidemiologist, and Jeanne Clémence, an educated woman from a wealthy Jewish Alsatian family. At nine, Proust suffered his first asthma attack and was sent to the village of Illiers, where much of his work is based. He experienced poor health throughout his time as a pupil at the Lycée Condorcet and then as a member of the French army in Orléans. Living in Paris, Proust managed to make connections with prominent social and literary circles that would enrich his writing as well as help him find publication later in life. In 1896, with the help of acclaimed poet and novelist Anatole France, Proust published his debut book Les plaisirs et les jours, a collection of prose poems and novellas. As his health deteriorated, Proust confined himself to his bedroom at his parents’ apartment, where he slept during the day and worked all night on his magnum opus In Search of Lost Time, a seven-part novel published between 1913 and 1927. Beginning with Swann’s Way (1913) and ending with Time Regained (1927), In Search of Lost Time is a semi-autobiographical work of fiction in which Proust explores the nature of memory, the decline of the French aristocracy, and aspects of his personal identity, including his homosexuality. Considered a masterpiece of Modernist literature, Proust’s novel has inspired and mystified generations of readers, including Virginia Woolf, Vladimir Nabokov, Graham Greene, and Somerset Maugham.

Reviews for The Fugitive

[maxernst11 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Deel VI. Proust worstelt met het vertrek van Albertine. Duidelijk minder, door gebrek aan lijn

[p_s_patrick · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

In this volume Proust's previous actions end with fitting resolution, with the captive of the last volume becoming the fugitive, and leaving him. The tone for a good part of this volume follows on from the previous one, with his jealousy and suspicion eventually bringing to surface some unexpected revelations, which are followed in the latter part of the book by other surprises, from elsewhere. Proust more or less comes to terms with his grief eventually, but fails to return to the quality of happinesses of the first couple of volumes, with the marriages of two of his once intimate friends provoking almost an attitude of indifference from him, showing perhaps his understandable weariness. Hopefully things will turn out better for him in the final volume.

[leslie398 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I found this penultimate volume of Proust's series the fastest moving one yet. There is some musing and philosophizing by Marcel, as always, but there are also several exciting and/or surprising events.

[rmagahiz · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Although this is the one volume some have advised the casual reader of Proust to skip entirely when dipping into the series, it plays an important role in showing the Narrator sink to his lowest level. He has adopted all the mores of the upper classes while simultaneously engaging in activities they forbid. Deciding to live with Albertine was the one serious choice he made, at the end of Cities of the Plain, and now when obsessive jealousy and an atmosphere of secrets destroyed the basis of that relationship. When the sudden disappearance of his mistress Albertine becomes permanent, he sinks down into himself and is eft with emptiness. He has not been equipped to know where to look for something or someone that will give back to his life any kind of meaning in this world he no longer controls. In this state of mind, he observes the life changes of those in his circle, abrupt changes in fortune and status, and while he knows what they mean according to the code of the ancien régime, on another level he can also sense too keenly how insubstantial is their underlying foundation.

By this point (and really by the beginning of The Captive), Proust is almost completely done with introducing important characters, which I appreciated. Instead of the whirl of names at the salons and on trains and carriages earlier, he brings in a completely new setting in a country we haven’t visited before. It is effective, particularly during an episode where a mistransmitted telegram is mistaken for an apparent message from the dead woman.

At the end of this book we have the strange motif that Proust uses of having a turn toward homosexuality or bisexuality encapsulate the idea of a character’s ruination. The only exception is the Narrator himself, who remains steadfastly straight. This feels like a ground rule that Proust set up and refuses to break, making it hard to support a strictly autobiographical reading of the series.

There are also some fine stretches of writing here including some of the biting wit we have seen before. But the sections which spoke to me the most were the Narrator’s musings on what it is like to continue after the death of someone who once meant a lot to him. What does it say about our lives if friends become unrecognizable, if even love can die in one’s heart?

[bookomaniac-1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Deel VI. Proust worstelt met het vertrek van Albertine. Duidelijk minder, door gebrek aan lijn