The cover of the ReadingRate edition of In Search of Lost Time

ReadingRate edition

In Search of Lost Time

Marcel Proust, 1913

4,858 pages · 1,214,362 words · about 134 hours · regard 97 of 100

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Marcel, a hypersensitive boy growing up in the provincial town of Combray, bites into a madeleine soaked in lime-blossom tea and finds himself transported back in time. That involuntary rush of memory sends him — and the reader — into seven volumes that take fifty years to traverse. Over that span, Marcel watches the aristocratic world of the Guermantes and Faubourg Saint-Germain collapse under its own frivolity and the pressure of war, falls into a jealousy over Albertine so consuming it borders on pathology, and discovers that the great painter Elstir and the composer Vinteuil have been hiding in plain sight all along. Proust writes sentences that refuse to end, each one spiraling through qualification and digression before arriving at its verb — but the delay is the point. The prose slows the reader to the speed of genuine perception, where a shift of light in a room or the smell of a corridor releases an entire childhood. The narrator is both the most precise social observer in French fiction and its most unreliable: he sees everything about others and nothing about himself until it is too late. Reading Proust is less like reading a novel than like acquiring a new set of senses — finer, slower, and permanently altered.

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