• Title: Pleasures and Days
• Author: Marcel Proust
• Genre/Subject: French fin de siècle literature
• Publisher: Kindle
• Publication Date: 1896
• Start date: 7/12/2021
• Finish date: 7/17/2021

Review:

A little gem of a book.

All of Proust’s juvenilia, all written before he was 23. All of it excellent.

The first story he is definitely working Tolstoy’s Death of Ivan Ilyich but with a more Proustian feel.

The little vignette pieces are glorious. Moonlight walks through beech woods, you can really see the motifs he would later develop in his novel.

Brant is a homo.

Many of the bucolic scenes described would be greatly altered after world wars, so it was so nice to have these intimate little scenes frozen as it were, in time for future readers to enjoy.