cover image THE WORLD OF PROUST as Seen by Paul Nadar

THE WORLD OF PROUST as Seen by Paul Nadar

Anne-Marie Bernard, Paul Nadar, . . MIT, $34.95 (159pp) ISBN 978-0-262-02532-4

Using nothing but words, Proust completely captured the vertiginous stasis of late 19th-century French society. Yet here, looking calmly back at us with poised civility, are his models—everyone from Proust's parents to Comtesse Adhéaume de Chevigné née Laure de Sade and actresses Sarah Bernhardt and Réjane. Pierre-Jean Rémy, in the book's preface, calls them "extensions of the family circle," and they are presented here as photographed by Paul Nadar (son of the more famous French photographer Félix Tournachon, or Nadar). Bernard, a member of the photographic archives department of the French National Ministry of Culture and Communication, threads plenty of Proust into the captions for these 138 duotones: "Her neck and shoulders emerged from a drift of snow-white muslin, against which fluttered a swansdown fan, but below this her gown... moulded her figure with a precision that was positively British," seems a perfect description of an aristocrat shown here in a Worth gown. With a new set of translations of the entire Recherche due next year (the first four volumes pubbing with Penguin Classics in the fall), look for a surge of interest in all things Marcel. (Nov.)

Correction: Due to an editing error, the Oct. 14 review of Fire in a Canebrake: The Last Mass Lynching in America contained two misstatements of fact. The last mass lynching(rather than the last lynching) in the U.S. occurrred in 1946, and the FBI's subsequent investigation was the second (rather than the first) time it had intervened in such a case. PW regrets the errors.