Marcel Proust, roman moderne: perspectives comparatistes ed. by Vincent Ferré et Raffaello Rossi (review)

This pluridisciplinary volume of a chorus of voices from the US, France, Italy, Germany, and the UK, provides a useful platform for researchers to present the essence of their ongoing or completed doctoral theses. The majority of the essays are the proceedings of a conference, organized by the editors in June 2015 at the Université Paris-Est Créteil, concentrating on Proust's links with modernity in a comparative context. The richness of the exchanges reveals the powerful tentacular effects of an immersive reading of Proust on the creativity of a range of European and American writers. The inventive Proust industry is alive and well, as Béatrice Athias shows in her investigations into the way in which 'proustolâtrie' has engendered four very convincing works: Pierre-Yves Leprince, Les Enquêtes de Monsieur Proust (Paris: Gallimard, 2014); Lorenza Foschini, Le Manteau de Proust, trans. by Danièle Valin (2010; Paris: Quai Voltaire, 2012); François Bon, Proust est une fiction (Paris: Seuil, 2013); and Véronique Aubouy and Mathieu Riboulet, À la lecture (Paris: Grasset, 2014). These 'hommages postmodernes rendus au roman moderne de Marcel Proust' (p. 32) are heavily interlaced with Proustian intertextuality. The blurred boundaries between Proust's writing and its appropriation are further developed by Claudia Jacobi in relation to Samuel Beckett's extensive use of Proustian parody in Molloy, and by Marco Piazza and Ilena Antici in their shared essay demonstrating engagingly how the 'proustisme' of Pedro Salinas, Proust's first translator, led to his being accused of plagiarism. Through the prism of autobiographical material, Sandra Cheilan examines the writing of Proust and Fernando Pessoa and discusses the hazy line between fact and fiction, a question also raised in the essay by Thierry Marchaisse. Marginality of place and character is examined by Géraldine Dolléans from a sociological perspective in relation to the works of Albert Cohen. Adeline Soldin's well-documented study of sexual marginality in Djuna Barnes's Nightwood reveals the American novelist's indebtedness to Proust. After skilfully redefining the traditional concept of metaphor in Proust's novel, Julia Hartley extracts unexpected analogies in Dante's Commedia. Richard Mason's comprehensive, lively examination of the erotic, vulgar, sometimes violent linguistic interstices in Proust and Jean Genet demonstrates how a successful decoding of these fragments can uncover hidden aspects of personality. The translator–author relationship permeates essays by Jérôme Bastianelli and Lydia Davis. Bastianelli highlights some of the difficulties Proust faced in translating Ruskin and argues that this activity was an essential part of the creative process. We are privileged to enter into the mind of Davis, the translator of the first volume of À la recherche du temps perdu as The Way by Swann's, and to share the challenges posed by Proust's prose. These were not only lexical and syntactic, but overwhelmingly sound-related, a task that required capturing Proust's inner voice before translating it into English. The volume concludes with Kirstin Ringelberg's interpretation of Madeleine Lemaire's floral empire through the lens of queer theory.