Christopher Prendergast

November 19th is the centenary of the death of Marcel Proust, and to mark the occasion we have programmed three events across the first Book Festival weekend celebrating Proust’s great novel.

‘Living and Dying with Marcel Proust’ is the result of a lifetime’s reading of, reflection on, and love for Proust’s masterpiece, ‘In Search of Lost Time’.

Christopher Prendergast, one of the world’s foremost literary scholars, and general editor of the most recent translation of ‘A la Recherche du Temps Perdu’, has produced a highly entertaining book that takes in such disparate Proustian obsessions as insomnia, food and digestion, colour, addiction, memory, breath and breathing, breasts, snobbism, music and humour.

The lives of his characters, both major and minor, are shown as criss-crossing and converging in ways that often take the reader by surprise, before descending on an irreversible trajectory of decline as the body starts to fail and the grave beckons.

‘Living and Dying with Marcel Proust’ will surely become the companion for all future readers either about to re-embark on Proust’s three-million-word journey or setting out for the first time.

Christopher Prendergast is a Fellow of King's College, Cambridge and a Fellow of the British Academy. He writes for the London Review of Books and the New Left Review. He is also the general editor of the Penguin reissues of Proust’s work.

“A work buzzing with appetite and curiosity... a real delight. No Proustian should be without it.”
-Andrew Marr

“Literate, lively, and leavened by wry and gentle humour, ‘Living and Dying with Marcel Proust’ is a feast”.
-Lydia Davis, winner of the International Booker Prize