SOURCE: Hindus, Milton. “Minor Works.” In A Reader's Guide to Marcel Proust, pp. 181-95. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2001.

In the following essay, first published in 1962, Hindus offers an overview of Pleasures and Days, Pastiches and Mélanges, and Chroniques, all of which are considered minor works of Proust.

Pleasures and Days

The first book published by Proust in 1896 at the age of twenty-five, with a perceptive preface by Anatole France, is a collection of prose and verse (the English translation retains the prose but drops the half dozen pages of verse “portraits of painters and musicians” which the French text includes). This excision, except perhaps from a scholarly point of view, seems to me to have been advisable, not only because it is difficult to carry over the quality and felicities of even the greatest poetry from one language to another but because Proust's gift was...