First Steps

The Complete Short Stories of Marcel Proust, translated by Joachim Neugroschel (Cooper Square Press, 224 pp., $25.95)

WAS there ever a great writer who began less auspiciously than Marcel Proust? His first book, Les Plaisirs et les jours, now ably translated, along with six additional pieces, by Joachim Neugroschel, so disgusted one reviewer that he ended up fighting a duel with its 25-year-old author. Others were less demonstrative only because they couldn’t summon the energy for a more emphatic dismissal. And while it is true that the novelist Pierre Loti praised the book, a posthumous examination of his library reveals that he never even cut the pages of his complimentary volume.

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James Gardner

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The Complete Short Stories of Marcel Proust, translated by Joachim Neugroschel (Cooper Square Press, 224 pp., $25.95)

WAS there ever a great writer who began less auspiciously than Marcel Proust? His first book, Les Plaisirs et les jours, now ably translated, along with six additional pieces, by Joachim Neugroschel, so disgusted one reviewer that he ended up fighting a duel with its 25-year-old author. Others were less demonstrative only because they couldn’t summon the energy for a more emphatic dismissal. And while it is true that the novelist Pierre Loti praised the book, a posthumous examination of his library reveals that he never even cut the pages of his complimentary volume.