Letters to the Lady Upstairs

Author(s): Marcel Proust

Literature

A charming, funny, poignant collection of twenty-three letters from Marcel Proust to his upstairs neighbour 102 Boulevard Haussmann, an elegant address in Paris's eighth arrondissement. Upstairs lives Madame Williams with her second husband, an American dentist, and her harp. Downstairs lives Marcel Proust, feverishly trying to write In Search of Lost Time, but all too often distracted by the incessant noise from the apartment above him - the footsteps and banging and unbearable moving of boxes and crates. Written by Proust to Madame Williams between the years 1909 and 1919, this little cache of letters was discovered a few years ago in the archives of a Paris museum. In them we read of the comings and goings of a Paris building; of the effort required to live peacefully with annoying neighbours; of the sadness of losing friends in the war; of concerts and music and writing; of illness; and - above all - of a growing, touching friendship between two lonely souls. `If you have suffered from noisy neighbours, you will sympathize with Marcel Proust' Times Literary Supplement `A haunting portrait of a friendship between two people who lived within earshot of one another, separated only by a few inches of plaster and floorboard, but who scarcely ever met' New Statesman


Product Information

`If you have suffered from noisy neighbours, you will sympathize with Marcel Proust' Times Literary Supplement `A haunting portrait of a friendship both evanescent and intense between two people who lived within earshot of one another, separated only by a few inches of plaster and floorboard, but who scarcely ever met' New Statesman `Full of wit and playful decorum' New Yorker `A trove of charming correspondence from literature's most famous "noise phobic"' Kirkus

Marcel Proust is the one of the world's most famous writers. Renowned for his epic novel in seven volumes, In Search of Lost Time, he is widely regarded as one of the greatest novelists of all time. He lived at 102 Boulevard Haussman between 1907 and 1919 and died in 1922. Lydia Davis is a prize-winning translator of French literature and the author of one novel and six short-story collections. She won the Man Booker International Prize in 2013.

General Fields

  • : 9780008262891
  • : HarperCollins Publishers
  • : Fourth Estate Ltd
  • : 0.27
  • : December 2017
  • : 191mm X 136mm
  • : United Kingdom
  • : December 2017
  • : books

Special Fields

  • : Marcel Proust
  • : Hardback
  • : 118
  • : English
  • : 846.912
  • : 112