Marcel Proust began writing his masterpiece, Remembrance of Things Past, in 1909; the final volume was published in 1927, five years after his death. It is a single work in seven volumes, and Volume I collects Swann’s Way and Within a Budding Grove. It’s long and remarkable, exploring the inner emotional life of the narrator, a sensitive young man who wants to be a writer, as well as society’s manners and foibles.
“But sometimes illumination comes to our rescue at the very moment when all seems lost; we have knocked at every door and they open on nothing until, at last, we stumble unconsciously against the only one through which we can enter the kingdom we have sought in vain a hundred years – and it opens.”
The prose is beautiful, and the emotion is intense. The writing is dense and thick, as if you’re deep under water and your very being is being compressed by the details of life. The novel’s themes include memory, sexuality, and class. As Marcel Pagnol put it, “The remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were.”
The only way to read Proust is slowly. You can read at most six pages at a time. The work is so rich that it stays with you forever.
See Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust on Audiobooks, Amazon/Audible, and Bookstores who are not Amazon.
You might also enjoy One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez.
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