A review by jacquesdevilliers
The Fugitive by Marcel Proust

3.0

Few who start Proust’s novel finish, which is probably why few remark on the fact that Proust himself never finished it. After 3000+ pages there is, thankfully, no brutal Kafkaesque plunge into irresolution. But the last three volumes were never published in Proust’s lifetime, and what he left his publishers were drafts polished to varying degrees of completion.

This context felt merely academic while reading the previous, and first posthumous volume, The Prisoner. Unfinished or not, I’d rank it among the finest of Proust’s writing. But The Fugitive is a different deal. It reeks of incompletion, and I can only imagine Proust, that timid perfectionist, aghast at its publication. It's narratively inconsistent. Characters recently dead come back to life, while other characters (like Charlus and Morel) act in ways that suggest that major events between them hadn’t recently occurred. More significant (since narrative events only count for so much in Proust anyway) is a structural unevenness. Despite being the slimmest of the seven volumes, I found The Fugitive to contain some of the most long-winded of sections. A phrase in one place is repeated more or less word for word in another, suggesting that Proust had still to decide where in the final manuscript it should go. Moreover the emotional terrain touched on here isn’t particularly different to what was already covered in The Prisoner - or, for that matter, the protagonist’s love for Gilberte in volume two. What felt fresh and bracing in The Prisoner starts to grate when repeated at length in The Fugitive. There are also some incredibly abrupt segues, most notably when the protagonist takes a much-anticipated, long-delayed trip to Venice, which leaps up at the reader seemingly out of nowhere.

I’m probably expressing more displeasure with The Fugitive than I actually felt while reading it. There are incredible episodes and even more incredible passages. And the ending makes a beautiful return to places and events in Volume One. But this is the first in the Proust series I’d regard as sub-par. Here’s hoping the final volume delivers a more polished conclusion.