The Prisoner (In Search of Lost Time Vol. 5): A New Translation

The Prisoner (La Prisonnière), published posthumously in 1923, is the fifth volume of Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time. This claustrophobic, psychologically intense novel explores the pathology of possessive love through the narrator's tortured relationship with Albertine, the young woman he has brought to live with him in Paris. What begins as an attempt to secure love through proximity becomes a study in mutual imprisonment, as the narrator discovers that physical possession only deepens his uncertainty and intensifies his jealousy.

Consumed by suspicions of Albertine's infidelity-particularly with other women-the narrator transforms his apartment into a prison where he can monitor her movements, control her activities, and extract confessions he will never believe. Yet in constraining her freedom, he becomes equally trapped, a prisoner of his own obsessive need for certainty in the face of desire's fundamental unknowability. Proust reveals how possessive love destroys what it seeks to preserve, how the attempt to possess another person completely leads only to isolation and despair.

The novel captures the paradoxes of jealous love with merciless psychological precision: the lover who tortures himself with suspicions he simultaneously dreads confirming, the jailer who finds no peace in his surveillance, the man who recognizes the futility of his obsession yet cannot escape it. Proust's prose achieves extraordinary intensity as it charts the narrator's descent into a private hell of his own construction.

This edition preserves Proust's profound psychological insight while rendering the prose accessible to contemporary readers. The Prisoner is essential reading for those who appreciate literature that explores the destructive dimensions of desire and illuminates the darkest territories of the human heart.