Eleonora Marangoni offers a new, interesting interpretation of Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time (or Remembrance of Things Past), in which colors are the imaginary wires which lead us through the novel.
Color isn’t ‘just’ color: like the word itself, the concept of color is laden with symbols, it evokes and transcends. Too important to be reduced to a mere nuance, too powerful to be contained in a single color preference: and if Proust, the Impressionist writer, who was a master of nuance, was unable to choose his own color, it’s because he carried on an exclusive rapport and an unending dialogue with every single one of them. For him, literature and art were bound by a double knot, just as words and color are inextricably linked. The complexity and depth of visual–and hence chromatic–experience is an essential key to the interpretation of his masterpiece Á la Recherche du Temps Perdu (In Search of Lost Time). Adopting this new point of view, Eleonora Marangoni tackles Proust’s famous work by drawing an invisible map where each color dominates a specific semantic area and a particular emotional space. One by one, she uses various chromatic symbols, choosing particular examples and images which, in the first part of the book, is inextricably linked to the text and quotations from the novel and, in the appendix at the end, constitutes a sort of sample book of the colors used in the book. The book opens with an introduction by Alessandro Piperno entitled ‘Life and Death of Charles Swann’. It refers to the main character in the book who, as a model aesthete, may be regarded as a spokesman for Proust in the artistic sphere.