In Search of Lost Time
by Marcel Proust (1913 – 1927)
translated from the French by C.K. Scott Moncrieff, Terence Kilmartin and Andreas Mayor, with revisions by D.J. Enright (1992)
Modern Library (2011)
4832 pp
For a long time, every New Year’s Day brought to me the same quiet resolution: this would be the year I finally read In Search of Lost Time. That thought returned faithfully, and just as faithfully slipped away.
But in late 2024, when a friend on Instagram floated the idea of #Proust2025, something shifted. For the first time, I knew I’d actually start it and I knew I’d finish it.
I have learned, slowly and still imperfectly, that for a reading project like this there is no perfect reading day coming on the horizon. The decision to start and to stick with it is made inside ordinary days.
And so, this week, after reading a little every single day since January 1, buoyed by friends reading alongside me, offering insight, humor, and patience, I found myself reading the final words of Time Regained.
I’ll be processing what this year-long reading has been for a long time, and I now understand why people return to this sometimes agonizing book. What I know already is this: In Search of Lost Time was more beautiful, more moving, and more profound than I expected. And while I’d heard warnings about long stretches and seemingly interminable parties, no one warned me how unsettling and troubling it often is, particularly in its examination of what the narrator so often mischaracterizes as “love.”
It has been a full experience, one I suspect will continue to unfold for me for years to come.
Yes, a wonderful book (or series), and I really need to continue on my second journey through the novel :)
It’s a wonderful reading experience, isn’t it? You can’t rush through it and it settles in your memory. There aren’t many books whose characters you remember so well, years after reading them.
It’s a lot more than anyone expects, I imagine. A lost world comes to life again and Proust has an incredible sense of humor. Some passages are really daring for the time too.
We owe his brother a lot: he made sure that the whole work was published after Marcel died. I never heard he cut some parts because they were too scandalous. Time Regained was published a year before Lady Chatterley’s Lover, if we think of literary scandals of the time.