'the metamorphosis of Monsieur de Charlus into a new person was so complete that... everything which had appeared incoherent to me until then, was becoming intelligible, and self-evident'
The fourth volume of Proust's
In Search of Lost Time extends the protagonist's journey of discovery into the social world of fin-de-si�cle France. As the biblically inflected title,
Sodom and Gomorrah, suggests, however, this world has taken on a new colouring. Through a succession of observations--both voyeuristic and overt--Proust's protagonist encounters and begins to appreciate the great diversity of sexual identities and proclivities that underpin human relations. At the heart of this volume that buzzes with chatter, gossip, and position-taking, is the Baron de Charlus, whose relationship with the working-class Charlie Morel is a central preoccupation of the narrative. This volume lays bare the ways in which ambitions and desires are nurtured, projected, masked, and exposed. Suffering, in love, is rarely far away.
Sodom and Gomorrah explores frictions between the social classes via the Verdurins' upward climb and the ways in which the impulses of desire can cut across society's arbitrary boundaries. The narrator recounts his retrospective devastation at the death of his grandmother, and while his connection to Albertine deepens, it is his uncertainty about the true nature of her sexual identity that binds him closer to her, leading to a fraught denouement that paves the way for the next, fateful phase of their relationship.
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Marcel Proust
Helen Constantine has translated many classic writers from French, including Colette, Zola, Laclos, Gautier, Flaubert, Balzac and Proust. She is the general editor of the City Tales series of short stories published by Oxford University Press.
Michael Lucey is Sidney and Margaret Ancker Chair and Distinguished Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. His books include
The Misfit of the Family: Balzac and the Social Forms of Sexuality (2003),
Never Say I: Sexuality and the First Person in Colette, Gide, and Proust (2006),
Someone: The Pragmatics of Misfit Sexualities, from Colette to Hervé Guibert (2019), and
What Proust Heard: Novels and the Ethnography of Talk (2022). His translation of Didier Eribon's
The Life, Old Age, and Death of a Working-Class Woman appeared in 2025.
Adam Watt is Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of Exeter, where he is Deputy Pro-Vice-Chancellor of the Faculty of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences. His books include
Reading in Proust's A la recherche: le délire de la lecture (2009),
The Cambridge Introduction to Marcel Proust (2011), a critical biography of Proust (2013), and, as editor,
Marcel Proust in Context (2013) and
The Cambridge History of the Novel in French (2021). He has published comparative work on Proust and a range of writers from Valéry, Rivière, Beckett, and Barthes to Eve Kosofsky-Sedgwick and Anne Carson.
