In Search of Lost Time

⚖The case for it

A boy waits upstairs to learn whether his mother will come kiss him goodnight, and four thousand pages grow out of that dread. The madeleine follows, then Combray itself, hawthorn hedges and two walking paths rendered until readers describe the village as a character. Swann's jealousy over Odette is the stretch people say they recognized themselves in, uncomfortably. Later the Baron de Charlus arrives, "Proust's most memorable monster," theatrical and cruel and the best-drawn figure in the work. What holds it together is the noticing: a woman "perched on her high seat like a cafe-bird," a social type fixed in six words. "Sentences and paragraphs contain whole worlds," one reader says of prose another calls a "hypnotic river that both transports and transcends."

— the honest librarian

✕The case against

The company you keep for four thousand pages is a narrator one reader calls "a conceited, insufferable little shit," and the Albertine volumes sharpen the problem: his surveillance of her reads to many as "rich, privileged sociopath, stalker, and pedophile" rather than as love. The salon scenes compound it, one stretch running close to two hundred pages of party talk where attention reliably breaks. Then the sentences, "labyrinthine prose with sentences so convoluted" that readers reparse the same clause three times hunting its verb. Even the madeleine underdelivers, "not nearly as iconic as people suggest." And Proust's underlying claim that suffering manufactures genius strikes several readers as self-serving, which is a lot to carry across seven volumes.

— the honest librarian

97h

honest hours

139

sittings