Author: Marcel Proust
Publisher:
Rating: WARTY!
Adapted and illustrated by Stéphane Heuet
Coloring by Véronique Dorey
Remembrance Of Things Past (French: À la Recherche du Temps Perdu) begins wiht a guy who can't even remember where he is when he wakes up in his own bed. What's his problem? He's obviously been complete mesmerized by the magic lantern showing of the opéra Geneviève de Brabant is an bouffe, or operetta, by Jacques Offenbach whose last name is "Beforeyouexpecthimtobe".
Alas, the little whiny-assed brat's problem is that he's a little whiney-assed brat and his parents are deadbeats. À la recherche du temps perdu technically means "seeking lost time" but is typically rendered as "a remembrance of things past", but having read this, a better rendition, it seems to me, is "a remembrance of things passed" - from the bowels. And there was evidently an obstructive mass of it, because the original ran to seven volumes and over three thousand pages.
This was written over a century ago, and I promise you if the same thing had been written today it would be rightfully trashed, but since it's old, and French, it's now looked upon as romantic and classical. The author seems to have had a very resentful memory of his childhood which he allows to flood his adult thoughts tainting them with the smell of a swamp. His past is the only present he will gift himself with for the future.
One really odd thing about this graphic novel is that many of the image panels were fully occupied by text such that it was only barely possible even to see what the image was. Some entire pages consisted almost entirely if text and the art work was of the most simplistic kind, so sparse it promises to start a post-minimalist movement evidently to be named scarcism.