In Search Of Lost Time Volume 4

Sodom and Gomorrah opens a new phase of In Search of Lost Time. While watching the pollination of the Duchess de Guermantes’s orchid the narrator secretly observes a sexual encounter between two men. “Flower and plant have no conscious will” Samuel Beckett wrote of Proust’s representation of sexuality. “They are shameless exposing their genitals. And so in a sense are Proust’s men and women . . . shameless. There is no question of right and wrong.”. For this authoritative English-language edition D. J. Enright has revised the late Terence Kilmartin’s acclaimed reworking of C. K. Scott Moncrieff’s translation to take into account the new definitive French editions of Á la recherché du temps perdu (the final volume of these new editions was published by the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade in 1989).