My final suggestion is about the edition one chooses. It is a lonely place to visit without a guide or at least a fellow tourist. Remembrance is the most complete portrait of a society in all of modern literature, one that is impossibly remote from the world of 60 years ago, much less today. This brings me to my next point, which is that one should try to read Proust alongside at least one other person, preferably an experienced Proustian who is making his way through for the second or third or tenth time. This is an exaggeration, but not a very gross. Nancy Mitford told Evelyn Waugh more than half a century ago that English speakers have always misunderstood Proust, whereas to the French he might as well be P.G.

(When you are a thousand or so pages in and cannot help yourself from pressing on to learn what Brichot has to say about the death of Swann, you will have reached the stage at which it is probably acceptable to lie down with Proust.) Sooner or later readers will discover that the novel unfolds not slowly per se but at something that approximates the pace of life itself - or, better yet, that 'real life' is blissfully Proustian.Īnother pitfall is the assumption (based, again, as far as I can tell on the fact that most would-be readers have not made it past the first eight or so pages of Swann's Way) that Proust is a very dour and introspective writer who is far more interested in what his narrator is feeling and thinking than what, if anything, happens in the world around him. It follows from here that Proust should be read slowly, 20 or so pages at a time. It is also more or less the only feeling most people associate with the author who, they would be astonished to learn, wrote equally well about love, family, religion, art, music, politics, fashion, the beauty of the natural world, anti-Semitism, and the weather. To begin at the beginning, the Combray overture at the outset of the first volume, Swann's Way, ('For a long time I used to go to bed early') is the most pleasant description of sleepiness ever written. If I had to guess, I would say that in the vast majority of cases the same handful of things prevent the average reader who is otherwise inclined to sit down with Proust from getting on. (The latter has also taken much longer to write than Remembrance.) Both of these have sold many millions of copies. At a few thousand pages and around 1,250,000 words, Proust is only slightly longer than Harry Potter, which has been read by millions of children, and A Song of Ice and Fire, a novel cycle about hobbits who have sex, stands unfinished at more than 5,000 pages. It cannot be a simple question of length. Why this is the case is not entirely clear.

Remembrance of Things Past (as I prefer to think of it) is probably the least read of all 'Great Books,' with the obvious exception of Finnegans Wake, which is neither great nor a book.

Remembrance of things past author