The Captive and The Fugitive: In Search of Lost Time, Volume 5

Marcel Proust’s monumental seven-part novel In Search of Lost Time is considered by many to be the greatest novel of the twentieth century. The Captive and The Fugitive, the fifth and sixth volumes of Proust’s masterpiece, contain some of literature’s most beautiful meditations on art, music, desire, jealousy, love and loss, grieving and forgetting. In this work, Proust continues his vast satirical fresco of high society in France just prior to the outbreak of World War I.

These volumes and the following volume were published posthumously, as Proust died when he was approximately one-third of the way through correcting the proofs for The Captive.The Fugitive was also the last volume translated by Charles Kenneth Scott Moncrieff, who did not live to finish his enormous task. This edition of the two, published together as the fifth volume, is edited and annotated by noted Proust scholar William C. Carter, who endeavors to bring the classic C. K. Scott Moncrieff translation closer to the spirit and style of the original.