Jérôme Prieur’s Zombie Proust, translated from the original Proust fantôme (2001) by Nancy Kline and published by Les Fugitives, reanimates the enigma of one of modern literature’s totemic figures, Marcel Proust. Habitually read as a roman à clef, À la recherche du temps perdu tantalises Prieur as an exhaustive examination of one man’s mind, with the biographer ‘descend[ing] 20,000 leagues beneath the sea’ to plumb its great depths. But no matter what depths are dived, ‘the v...
