Early Failure

PLEASURES AND REGRETS (221 pp.)--Marcel Proust--Lear-Crown ($2.75).

Only a handful of Parisians read this anemic little book when it first appeared in 1896. Few of them could have thought it likely that its author, a rather foppish and not very likable young social climber, would later devote the bulk of his adult life to composing one of the literary masterpieces of the times: Remembrance of Things Past. Even the most fanatical Proustians will have to grant that Pleasures and Regrets, now translated into English for the first time, is a trivial book. Languid little pseudo-pastoral sketches bedecked with whipped-cream imagery, pallid reflections on life and love in the sickliest fin de siecle manner, soft-jellied tales about soft-jellied love affairs--this is the picture the reader gets of the early Proust.

But if Pleasures and Regrets is read in anticipation of a masterpiece to come, it has considerable interest. In its pale pieces can be found many of Proust's later themes: his view of human love as a sweet, evanescent sickness that briefly drives its victim to feverish pitches of feeling and then leaves him sated and bored; his fascination with the workings of human memory, which he saw as a treacherous filter distorting the qualities and meanings of past experience; and his complex attitude to high society, which delighted his snobbishness and shocked his moral feelings.

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