Audiobook Publisher Issues 120-Disc Version of Proust

September 7, 2012, 9:00 am

By CHARLES MCGRATH

Lovers of Proust, get out your headphones: Naxos AudioBooks, a British division of the classical music label, has recorded all seven volumes of “Remembrance of Things Past” on CD - 120 discs, which will take 153 hours to get through. The last one comes out on Oct. 29.

Nicolas Soames, the publisher, said in an interview that the new version replaces an earlier, abridged edition - just 36 CDs - that the company recorded between 1996 and 2000. He believes the 120-disc edition (also available for download), which will cost £380 (about $600), to be the longest audiobook in existence.

It took 45 days of actual recording, spread over about a year, Mr. Soames said, for the reader Neville Jason , to complete all 3,000 pages.

Mr. Jason, 78, is a classically trained actor who not only recorded the book but did the abridgement of the earlier version and also translated the final volume, which Proust's first English translator, C. K. Scott Moncrieff, left unfinished at his death.

Speaking over the phone with the careful enunciation that once earned the diction prize at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, Mr. Jason said about recording Proust, “These things sort of take over in ways you didn't expect. This second time, it seemed such a massive task that I put it off for years. But once I started, it wasn't so daunting: it's just a question of keeping going. As an actor, I approach it like a play. It's a performance, really - a sort of one-man show.”

He added that he had no trouble keeping straight the voices he used for major characters, like the Baron de Charlus. “I felt I knew him so well,” Mr. Jason said. “But for minor characters - the odd housemaid, the odd count - sometimes one did have to go back and refer.”