Reviewed in Brief

Jean Santeuil, by Marcel Proust. Translated by Gerard Hopkins. 744 pp. New York: Simon and Schuster. $5.95

This a “a novel,” declares the book jacket, but the title page, less dishonest, keeps mum. Actually, it is a text put together by a French graduate student out of some seventy notebooks in which Proust garnered the straw that his genius, twenty years later, was to spin into gold. It is good to have it in print. On the other hand, this is a collection of youthful, timorous fragments, which can be interesting only to those who already know Remembrance of Things Past intimately. To anyone else, it is the year’s most unblushing proof that publishers, no less than soap manufacturers, believe in Brand Names.

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Jean Santeuil, by Marcel Proust. Translated by Gerard Hopkins. 744 pp. New York: Simon and Schuster. $5.95

This a “a novel,” declares the book jacket, but the title page, less dishonest, keeps mum. Actually, it is a text put together by a French graduate student out of some seventy notebooks in which Proust garnered the straw that his genius, twenty years later, was to spin into gold. It is good to have it in print. On the other hand, this is a collection of youthful, timorous fragments, which can be interesting only to those who already know Remembrance of Things Past intimately. To anyone else, it is the year’s most unblushing proof that publishers, no less than soap manufacturers, believe in Brand Names.