Friday, November 17, 2006

Albertine Gone

I have now finished Albertine Gone by Marcel Proust, which although being much shorter than The Fugitive - the standard version of this volume - it does contain much of the same content. This is the book that resulted from Proust's family finding it among his papers but it was not published until the late 1980s.
The one major difference is that when Marcel is told of Albertine’s death he is also given a location of the horse accident and it is near to where the notorious lesbian Mlle Vinteuil lived so in death her lies are undone. Because of that it might explain why he is tighter with the rest of the copy because he does not need to delve too much into her past to know that she was a liar and kept a life hidden from him.

In all honesty I only picked this up from the library because I felt it might add something to the experience of Remembrance of Things Past but my advice is stick with the standard version because this adds one major detail, which becomes irrelevant anyway as a result of his later investigations which prove beyond doubt that Albertine kept secrets from him.