The Seventy-Five Folios and Other Unpublished Manuscripts

Presented for the first time in English, the recently discovered early manuscripts of the twentieth centurys most towering literary figure offer uncanny glimpses of his emerging genius and the creation of his masterpiece. One of the most significant literary events of the century, the discovery of manuscript pages containing early drafts of Marcel Prousts In Search of Lost Time put an end to a decades-long search for the Proustian grail. The Paris publisher Bernard de Fallois claimed to have viewed the folios, but doubts about their existence emerged when none appeared in the Proust manuscripts bequeathed to the Bibliothque Nationale in 1962. The texts had in fact been hidden among Falloiss private papers, where they were found upon his death in 2018. The Seventy-Five Folios and Other Unpublished Manuscripts presents these folios here for the first time in English, along with seventeen other brief unpublished texts. Extensive commentary and notes by the Proust scholar Nathalie Mauriac Dyer offer insightful critical analysis. Characterized by Fallois as the precious guide to understanding Prousts masterpiece, the folios contain early versions of six episodes included in the novel. Readers glimpse what Prousts biographer Jean-Yves Tadi describes as the sacred moment when the great work burst forth for the first time. The folios reveal the autobiographical extent of Prousts writing, with traces of his family life scattered throughout. Before the existence of Charles Swann, for example, we find a narrator named Marcel, a testament to what one scholar has called the gradual transformation of lived experience into (auto)fiction in Prousts elaboration of the novel. Like a painters sketches and a composers holographs, Prousts folios tell a story of artistic evolution. A dream of a book, a book of a dream, Fallois called them. Here is a literary magnum opus finding its final form.