The Prisoner: In Search of Lost Time vol. 5
About this audiobook
The Prisoner is the fifth volume of In Search of Lost Time. The titular "prisoner" is Albertine, the tall, dark orphan with whom Marcel had fallen in love at the end of Sodom and Gomorrah (volume 4).
Albertine has moved in with Marcel in his family's apartment in Paris, where the pair have a seemingly limitless supply of money and are chaperoned only by Marcel's judgmental family servant, Françoise. Marcel, who worries obsessively about Albertine's relationships with other women, grows more and more irrational in his attempts to control her, keeping her prisoner in his apartment and buying her couture gowns, furs, and jewelry in an attempt to protect her from herself and from the outside world and.
And yet in addition to being a tragedy of possessive love, The Prisoner is also a comedy of human folly and misunderstanding, linked to the other volumes of the larger novel through its themes of class differences, art, irrationality, social snobbery, and, of course, time and memory.
About the author
Marcel Proust was a French novelist, critic, and essayist who wrote the monumental novel In Search of Lost Time (À la recherche du temps perdu; with the previous English title translation of Remembrance of Things Past), originally published in French in seven volumes between 1913 and 1927. He is considered by critics and writers to be one of the most influential authors of the 20th century.
