by Jérôme Prieur

Translated by Nancy Kline

Publication date: 10 July 2025

PRIX CÉLESTE ALBARET 2001

“Marcel Proust passed away on the 18th of November. It was 1922. One day, I could no longer resist: I went in search of him.

“I prowled about, I visited the rooms where he had lived, I caught glimpses of abandoned châteaus and haunted places, I walked in his footsteps. I wanted to see what his eyes had seen. I looked at his photographs, I uncovered relics and little treasures. I tried to find out who he had been in life, what he had really been like. I interrogated those among the dead who could still reply: his friends, his confidants, those who had crossed paths with him.

“Who was he? The dandy who set out for salons as though on a foreign expedition? Or the invisible man who flinched from the light, the character in a thriller? The brilliant writer was concealing a doppelgänger, and I pursued him as though tracking down a missing relative.” — Jérôme Prieur

What is a writer’s life, and above all, what is left of it? This book is not a biography, but a quest; an expedition to unearth what remains of the author of Remembrance of Things Past. What was it like to be in his remarkable presence? What was it like to be inside his skin – especially during his final years of intense reclusive absorption in the writing of his great book?

Haunted places and abandoned sets, rare photographs, tinpot relics, half-erased fingerprints, flashes of light, piles of little memories serve as talismans through which Jérôme Prieur materialises the eponymous writer’s body and spirit in short, vivid chapters which resemble prose poems. Rich in detail, wry humour and quirky erudition, Zombie Proust brings back to life the invisible being, recalling his image as one summons a ghost.

‘Prieur has succeeded magnificently in bringing his portrait of Proust to life’
—Le Monde

'Prieur explores places, questions traces, lingers on moments of Proust's life, sentences from In Search of Lost Time, images - again and again - like those words, haloed in mystery, which open wide the doors of imagination.'
—Télérama

'Every page is shot through with the feeling of overwhelming, enthusiastic, affectionate gratitude that readers of In Search of Lost Time feel for Proust the writer and Proust the man.'
—Le Matricule des anges

'Scarcely any other book on Proust evades with such effortless skill the classic dilemma of whether to relate everything to the work or to the man. Prieur resurrects them both as a single phantom, in the night time favoured by Proust, perfectly conjuring up scents and tastes, with a love which owes nothing to neurosis.'
—Journal du Dimanche

Paperback original with lilac endpages
200 pages, 180 × 120 mm