WIN $150 GIFT VOUCHERS: ALADDIN'S GOLD
Antoine Compagnon is the Blanche W. Knopf Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, professor emeritus at the Collège de France, and a member of the Académie française. He is the author of many books on subjects including Montaigne, Baudelaire, Proust, Colette, literary theory, and cultural history. Jody Gladding is a poet who has translated dozens of works from French.
Compagnon, a world-renowned Proust scholar for the past four decades, reveals the history of the maternal side of the novelist’s family and explains how Proust was read and appropriated by Jewish critics after his death in France and elsewhere. The book unfurls like an investigation and is a highly enjoyable read. -- François Proulx, author of <i>Victims of the Book: Reading and Masculinity in Fin-de-Siècle France</i> Antoine Compagnon makes a poignant contribution to an already rich critical literature on Proust’s complex relationship to his Jewish ancestors by Evelyne Bloch-Dano, Maurice Samuels, Pierre Birnbaum, and others. Compagnon’s search for the letter where Proust evokes his grandfather laying a pebble on his own father’s grave becomes, through his meticulous account, an allegory of the triumph of research against error and loss. The master of what he called, in his classic study of Montaigne, 'The Second Hand or the Work of Quotation' has surpassed himself in this, his fiercest search. -- Alice Kaplan, author of <i>Seeing Baya: Portrait of an Algerian Artist in Paris</i>
