Book review
In Search of Lost Time
Proust’s seven-volume work turns memory, jealousy and social observation into an extraordinary reading experience.
This review discusses plot developments, including the ending.
In Search of Lost Time has a reputation that precedes it: seven volumes, thousands of pages in many editions, sentences that can run for half a page or more. All of that is true. It is also one of the most rewarding reading experiences literature has to offer, a novel that changes how you notice your own life.
The narrator, a sensitive young man from a wealthy Parisian family, looks back over his childhood, his first loves, his entry into high society and his long hesitation over becoming a writer. Very little happens in the conventional sense. Instead, Proust follows the movements of memory, desire and perception with extraordinary patience.
The most famous moment comes early. The narrator dips a madeleine into a cup of tea, and the taste unexpectedly releases a flood of memories of the village of Combray where he spent childhood holidays. That idea, that the past survives not in deliberate recollection but in chance sensations, becomes the engine of the whole work.
Around it, Proust builds a vast social panorama of Belle Époque France: the snobbish salons of the aristocracy and the rising bourgeoisie, the Dreyfus Affair splitting society, the First World War, the slow decline of a whole class. His characters, from the scheming Madame Verdurin to the magnificent, tragic Baron de Charlus, are among the most fully realised in fiction. He also writes about jealousy with a forensic intensity that is almost unbearable, above all in the narrator’s obsessive love for Albertine.
The difficulties are real. The pace is slow, and the middle volumes, especially the long stretches of society gatherings and of the narrator’s jealousy, can test even devoted readers. The narrator’s self-absorption is part of the point, but it can be suffocating. The final volumes were published after Proust’s death and show signs of incomplete revision.
Then comes Time Regained, the last volume, where everything gathers. The narrator finally understands what his book must be, and the reader realises that this is the book they have been holding all along. Few endings in literature are so earned.
Practical advice: start with Swann’s Way, read it slowly, and do not try to rush. Many readers take a year or more. The modern Penguin translations or the revised Moncrieff-Kilmartin-Enright edition are both excellent.