The Captive

Listening to Proust may be the ideal way to experience this great French writer. His prose is exquisite, but so careful in its variation that it benefits greatly from Neville Jason's narration. Jason performs the text, more than reading it, and his marked changes in tone, pace, and breath make this a pleasure to listen to. Jason also emphasizes the humor of the text, playing up each speaker's verbal tics. Proust's story focuses on desire and art. The desire is examined through character thought and action, the art through the precision of the prose, and through the snippets of period music that are occasionally carefully interwoven with it. G.T.B. (c) AudioFile 2004, Portland, Maine

Neville Jason strives for clarity and succeeds with distinction. Proust spent more than a decade cloistered in his sickbed, writing his massive, autobiographical novel, or rather, series of novels, In Search of Lost Time. In this volume, published posthumously in 1923, our hero Marcel remembers his obsessive affair with Albertine, whom he sequesters in his Paris flat. Naxos is publishing the entire oeuvre narrated by the indefatigable Neville Jason. No one could undertake such a job thoroughly without decades of preparation. Judging by this, the actor has put in plenty of time, even abridging the text himself. As reader he has a fine voice and excellent technique. He strives for clarity--not an easy job considering some of the author's page-long sentences--and succeeds with distinction. If the resonances at times elude him--well, they elude a lot of people. What he has achieved is well worth hearing. And he deserves plaudits for the sheer chutzpah of taking this job on. Y.R. Winner of AUDIOFILE Earphones Award (c) AudioFile 2001, Portland, Maine