Nine gay love stories by French author Marcel Proust are set to be published this fall for the first time. The stories take the form of “fairytales, fantasy and dialogues with the dead.”
The Guardian reports: “Touching on themes of homosexuality, the stories were written by Proust during the 1890s, when he was in his 20s and putting together the collection of poems and short stories that would become Plaisirs et les jours (Pleasures and Days). He decided not to include them. In the 1950s, they were discovered by the late Proust specialist Bernard de Fallois, whose publishing house Editions de Fallois will publish them in French in October, 97 years after Proust's death, under the title Le Mystérieux Correspondant (The Mysterious Correspondent).”
Wrote Luc Fraisse of the stories: “A question arises from the outset: why did Proust dismiss Plaisirs these texts that were mentioned in the initial summary entitled ‘The Castle of Eve' and left some in a state of relative incompleteness? It is obviously necessary to weigh the answer with the greatest circumspection. No doubt he considered that because of their audacity they could have hit a social milieu where a strong traditional morality prevailed. Without recourse to biographical erudition, this interpretation is certainly not arbitrary if one thinks of the rigor of the ‘people of Combray,' as evoked in the first part of Swann's Side , for example. Indeed, the dominant theme of these works is the analysis of ‘the physical love so unjustly decried' ( Swann ) in terms that announce and foreshadow Sodom and Gomorrah , either directly or through transposition.”
