Someone asked The Paris Review which translation of Proust to read and their answer is "Start with Davis, then switch to Montcrieff/Enright.
From Paul La Farge’s Favorite Reads from 2011: "...And finally, the award for Most Shocking Rhythm Change near the End of a Long Novel goes to Marcel Proust for Le Côté de Guermantes, in which the narrator, having done more or less nothing for many hundreds of pages, finally, in a fit of rage, stomps on the Baron de Charlus’s hat." (12/15/11)
Lorin Stein, new editor of the Paris Review, on Jewish writers... "...The other writers, the ones who are our age—for them it’s a fact of life that doesn’t need to be celebrated particularly. It almost sounds odd to call Lipsyte a Jewish writer. We call Proust a Jewish writer, I think, because he wrote so much about being Jewish. (Plus—if you can claim Proust, you claim Proust.) ..." (6/2/11)
"...Through his eyes we see what actuates the dandy and the lover and the grandee and the hypocrite and the poseur, with a transparency unexampled except in Shakespeare or George Eliot. And this ability, so piercing and at times even alarming, is not mere knowingness. It is not, in other words, the product of cynicism. To be so perceptive and yet so innocent—that, in a phrase, is the achievement of Proust. It is also why one does well to postpone a complete reading until one is in the middle of life, and has shared some of the disillusionments and fears, as well as the delights, that come with this mediocre actuarial accomplishment." From The Acutest Ear in Paris : Christopher Hitchens examines the Davis translation in The Atlantic Monthly, Jan 2004
One-minute video of Alain de Botton telling why he wrote his self-help book, How Reading Proust Can Change Your Life. See many other videos by searching on "Marcel Proust."
Stephane Heuet's series of graphic-novel versions of RTP. Amazing books. NPR interviewed (4 minutes) Heuet when the combined & re-translated English edition came out in 2016 to mixed reivews.
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Paul Murray, author of Skippy Dies, is reading Proust.
Angel: What are you reading? Murray: I’m reading Within a Budding Grove. Proust.
Angel: Is In Search of Lost Time a book you’ve meant to read for a long time and finally got around to reading? Murray: Well, actually I was pretty daunted by it, so I’d set it by for my retirement. But the book I’m working on now has a French narrator so I thought I should bone up on French culture. I’m reading it in English, but I thought that this was a key text and it is the key text. I’m realizing while I’m reading it that it is so influential.
Angel: Which translation are you reading? Murray: I’m reading the Scott Moncrieff translation.
Angel: How many hours a day do you devote to that? Murray: Nabokov wrote an essay about the first volume in which he says, “In Search of Lost Time makes up 4,000 pages which are about a month’s reading.” That’s Nabokov. It took me a month to read the first volume. The sentences are so convoluted you have to read almost every single one twice. The first time round you’re just looking for the verb, then you go back and work out what he’s talking about. So it’s slow going. And I’m reading other stuff, too. {....}
