About:
'The Prisoner' in the series 'Remembrance of Things Past' by Marcel Proust is a complex exploration of love, possession, and obsession. The protagonist, Marcel, is depicted as a prisoner of his own imagination and desires, unable to fully understand or control the object of his affection, Albertine. The book delves into themes of jealousy, failed love affairs, and the belief that love entails total possession and knowledge of the beloved, leading to a tumultuous and manipulative relationship between Marcel and Albertine.
From The Publisher:
The long-awaited fifth volume-representing "the very summit of Proust's art" ( Slate )-in the acclaimed Penguin translation of "the greatest literary work of the twentieth century" ( The New York Times )
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.
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