Zombie Proust by Jérôme Prieur, translated by Nancy Kline, Les Fugitives, 2025

 “Marcel Proust was never filmed at all,” asserts Jérôme Prieur in Proust fantôme, his 2001 French text rendered into English by Nancy Kline in 2025 as Zombie Proust. In 2017, however, a Canadian professor claimed that he had found Proust’s moving specter in the silent footage of Countess Élaine Greffulhe’s 1904 wedding to the Duke de Guiche. Entering the frame about 35 seconds in, Proust, or his mustached double, wearing a pearl-gray overcoat, black vest, and black bowler hat, looking somewhat less formal than the other guests and in a hurry, descends the stairs, overtakes some older folks, and exits the frame.

The discovery of this possible Proust, occuring in the interval between Prieur’s originally published text and its translation, seems to be especially meta. Whenever we talk about Proust and his seven-volume novel, In Search of Lost Time, there exists always a splintering tension between chronological and subjective recollections, motion and stillness, analogous to the temporal, spatial, and linguistic gaps between an original text and its translation. In short, there are many ways to interpret Prieur’s statement that Proust “was never filmed,” just as there are many ways to read Zombie Proust.  READ MORE…