This chapter considers the formal and thematic legacy of Dostoevsky, Proust, Kafka, and Beckett on Kazuo Ishiguro’s late-modernist work. Situating Ishiguro’s lengthiest, most digressive, most formally challenging and funniest novel within the European modernist tradition, the chapter analyses its marked formal experimentation in the light of its idiosyncratic and often highly disturbing blend of humour and mishap, of comedy and adversity. The chapter proposes that The Unconsoled can be considered not only Ishiguro’s but also one of late-modernism’s great comic novels. As such, Ishiguro’s novel may be said successfully to resist the major consolation of meaning-making, parting company with narrative as a calmative and leaving behind the affirmations of consolation and solace.

Surrealism is thought to have taken a very firm stance against the genre of the novel, a view based in much of the work of André Breton, who championed surrealist poetry and inveighed against the bourgeois commercialism of the realist novel. Yet the story is more complicated, and needs to be seen more broadly. This essay begins by contextualizing what André Breton meant in the 1920s by ’the novel’, in a kinship with a larger tradition of writers not formally associated with surrealism, especially Marcel Proust. Starting from Breton’s Nadja and L’amour fou, this essay tells the secret story of the production and circulation of the intellectual ideas that went into Breton’s fictions, but also of their ramifications through other world writers and filmmakers: from Dante, Nerval, and Proust to filmmakers like the Chilean Raúl Ruiz in Time Regained and the Italian Paolo Sorrentino in La grande bellezza. Through the complex network opened by Breton’s theoretical and literary texts, the novel changes significantly across this history, overlapping with poetry, the essay, autobiography, and with art film today.

Apart from three early experiments in playwriting, Wallace Stevens was almost entirely a poet. Yet the fact that Stevens positioned himself so adamantly in the realm of poetry and kept away from the art of the novel does not mean he did not ponder questions of aesthetic affinity. In a 1948 letter, for instance, he shared his perspective on Marcel Proust: “The only really interesting thing about Proust that I have seen recently is something that concerned him as a poet. It seems like a revelation, but it is quite possible to say that that is exactly what he was and perhaps all that he was.” When we consider Proust’s use of similes as well as the way Proust intertwines his studies of the senses, time, and the resources of memory in his monumental work, we begin to grasp Stevens’s appreciation of the French novelist. Goldfarb’s chapter amplifies Proust’s presence in Stevens in three segments: the first addresses Stevens’s relation to modernist fiction; the second probes Stevens’s insight into Proust’s writing style; the third focuses on Proustian echoes in Stevens’s verse, particularly on the interlacing themes of the senses, time, and memory in shorter poems across different volumes.

Marcel Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu (1913–27) is a modern classic, arguably the most influential French novel of the twentieth century. This chapter examines its landmark status, its composition, structure and thematic preoccupations. It investigates why Proust’s novel stands apart from others produced contemporaneously and why its appeal endures to this day. Proust’s novel is shown to be a work characterized by plurality and multiplicity, an echo chamber of earlier works of art, and a vital staging post in the history of the novel. The reception of Proust's novel is considered, together with its place in the development of European modernism. Its long gestation and piecemeal publication are discussed and related to contemporary publications and the ways in which Proust adapted his novel and its architecture to the events—geopolitical and personal—that occurred during this time. The chapter examines the demands made of Proust’s readers by his narrative techniques and the strategies we develop to cope with the scale and ambition of his novel. It closes with a reflection on the ways in which twentieth- and twenty-first century French novelists have responded to Proust’s achievements.