#RivetingReviews: Tom Taylor reviews ZOMBIE PROUST by Jérôme Prieur, translated by Nancy Kline

Jérôme Prieur’s Zombie Proust, translated from the original Proust fantôme (2001) by Nancy Kline and published by Les Fugitives, reanimates the enigma of one of modern literature’s totemic figures, Marcel Proust. Habitually read as a roman à clef, À la recherche du temps perdu tantalises Prieur as an exhaustive examination of one man’s mind, with the biographer ‘descend[ing] 20,000 leagues beneath the sea’ to plumb its great depths. But no matter what depths are dived, ‘the visible body’ – that is, the biographical individual – ‘encloses the other, invisible, subterranean’. The ‘life of an author’, to answer Prieur’s question on page sixteen, isn’t reducible to the facts of their existence – dates, events, anecdotes – but is instead something that resurfaces only obliquely through literature. 

For Proust’s immortalisation in À la recherche ensures that he is endlessly deferred, never fully intelligible, yet is continually re-encountered in the play of his text as what Prieur terms at one point a ‘simulacrum’. To pursue this in the terms of French philosopher and sociologist, Jean Baudrillard, ‘The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth – it is the truth which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true.’ In this sense, the author, Proust, collapses into his narrator, Marcel, existing less as a biographical subject than as a textual effect.

Accordingly, Prieur eschews traditional biography, constructing a Modiano-like psycho-geographical elegy that delicately traces Proust’s spectral imprint through photographs, memorabilia, physical places and the people that knew Proust best. It is difficult to peer beneath the clichés with which Proust is shrouded – and into which Prieur consciously falls. He has the ‘look of an El Greco painting, a Neapolitan prince, an Assyrian magus’. Primped, preened, pallid, Proust is lost amidst Prieur’s deluge of textual signs until his sickly body succumbs in a fin-de-siècle shrine to the Decadence movement, ‘plunged in a mist of fumigations’ and candles. He metamorphoses, in Prieur’s words, into a ‘puppet’. The nod to Rachilde’s archetypal Decadent text, Monsieur Vénus – in which a character is turned into a mechanically animated wax dummy after his death, forever to be exploited – is striking; the biographical Proust, too, risks being reduced to a lifeless effigy, ‘a mannequin that must be carried around, dressed, manipulated’. For, as Prieur admits, the portrait, like the biography, is ‘[a] trap where adoration and devotion belong as much as cruelty’. 

Not that Proust – the preeminent portraitist of Belle Époque Paris – could avoid such accusations. A foppish dandy, whip-smart, sharp-tongued, the Proust that emerges from Zombie Proust is decidedly vampiric. He thrives off the ‘fresh blood’ of the salons’ denizens; he turns his victims, friends and lovers alike ‘inside out like rabbit skins’ to ‘see what is beneath’.  

But Zombie Proust is as much about the author as it is a textual staging of the mechanisms by which we try to seize hold of the past. In the early twentieth century, photography, cinema, and the X-ray all claimed to penetrate surface and capture essence. A medical and cinematographic lexicon pervades Zombie Proust with both allure and menace: the photograph strips away, the X-ray exposes, the recording extracts. For contemporaries, the camera was feared as a medium of metaphysical divination or even a ‘violent extraction’ of the sitter’s soul. Later critics would confirm this ambivalence: André Bazin saw photography as the mummification of time; Roland Barthes viewed it as an art that arrests what is no longer there, inexorably bound to death. Yet where photography immobilises, Proust’s language resurrects. His prose probes like an X-ray, flays like a scalpel, but instead of leaving its object lifeless, it restores it in words.

What emerges, then, is not Proust himself but rather his paradoxical presence-in-absence – a figure invoked only insofar as he is effaced. This is, of course, the very aporia of À la recherche. In its final volume, Le Temps retrouvé, the narrator confides: 

‘Reality has disappointed me because at the moment when I perceived it, my imagination, which was my only organ for the enjoyment of beauty, could not be applied to it, by virtue of the inevitable law which means that one can imagine only what is absent.’

In other words, joy is only possible in absence; the presence of beauty extinguishes the imagination that apprehends it. To encounter Proust, then, is always to encounter a ghost: endlessly resurrected but never present. Prieur has therefore succeeded in created a hauntingly beautiful, astonishingly lucid and quietly witty work, one that bears witness to both the life and enduring art of Marcel Proust.

Reviewed by Tom Taylor

ZOMBIE PROUST

by Jérôme Prieur

Translated from French by Nancy Kline

Published by Les Fugitives (2025)

September 2025 #RivetingReviews titles are available to buy from bookshop.org.

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Tom Taylor is a literary scout and writer based in London.

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