The Thing

Michael Wood

• In Search of Lost Time: Vol. I: The Way by Swann’s by Marcel Proust, edited by Christopher Prendergast, translated by Lydia Davis
  Penguin, 496 pp, £8.99, October 2003, ISBN 0 14 118031 5
• In Search of Lost Time: Vol.II: In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower by Marcel Proust, edited by Christopher Prendergast, translated by James Grieve
  Penguin, 576 pp, £8.99, October 2003, ISBN 0 14 118032 3
• In Search of Lost Time: Vol. III: The Guermantes Way by Marcel Proust, edited by Christopher Prendergast, translated by Mark Treharne
  Penguin, 640 pp, £8.99, October 2003, ISBN 0 14 118033 1
• In Search of Lost Time: Vol. IV: Sodom and Gomorrah by Marcel Proust, edited by Christopher Prendergast, translated by John Sturrock
  Penguin, 576 pp, £8.99, October 2003, ISBN 0 14 118034 X
• In Search of Lost Time: Vol. V: ‘The Prisoner’ and ‘The Fugitive’ by Marcel Proust, edited by Christopher Prendergast, translated by Carol Clark and Peter Collier
  Penguin, 720 pp, £8.99, October 2003, ISBN 0 14 118035 8
• In Search of Lost Time: Vol. VI: Finding Time Again by Marcel Proust, edited by Christopher Prendergast, translated by Ian Patterson
  Penguin, 400 pp, £8.99, October 2003, ISBN 0 14 118036 6
• The Proust Project edited by André Aciman
  Farrar, Straus, 224 pp, US $25.00, November 2004, ISBN 0 374 23832 4

What was it Proust said about paradise? That all paradises are lost paradises? That the only true paradise is a lost paradise? That it isn’t paradise until it’s lost? That paradise is a name for a favourite form of loss? He can plausibly be read as saying any of these things, and perhaps more than one at once. But the propositions are not identical, and it’s not easy to choose among them. Can’t we look at what Proust actually wrote? We can look at what he literally wrote, but that’s not quite the same thing.