Should You Read Proust?

In early March of 2025, I embarked on a personal quest to read Marcel Proust’s mammoth work, In Search of Lost Time (À la recherche du temps perdu in the original French), famous for being the longest novel ever written. Quibbling with that distinction is a bit like arguing over what is the tallest building: it all depends on what you call a novel and where the building ends and the decorative antenna begins. But all that is besides the point. At roughly 9.6 million characters, spread out over 1.2 million words, covering more than 3000 pages (3175 pages in the Penguin Classics Deluxe version I read), Proust’s opus is a massive undertaking with a terrifyingly long trudge to its highest floor. To put this in context, I have read Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace (1440 pages) and Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables (1456 pages), which both come in at less than half the Lost Time page count.

    What really needs to be appreciated before one embarks on a Proustian journey, is the complexity of his prose. Proust wrote in long, complex sentences, filled with asides, parentheticals, and clause after clause connected by commas and semi-colons stretching to the horizon. A typical Proust sentence was often a paragraph, while a typical Proust paragraph covers multiple pages. In addition to holding the record for longest novel, Proust is also generally regarded as the record holder for longest sentence in French literature, coming in at 958 words. I will attach that lunatic of a sentence to the bottom of the article if you wish to peruse it yourself. Parsing a Proust sentence often requires a decent bit of focus and attention even in an otherwise straight forward descriptive sentence, such as one would use for the introduction of a character or the description of a walk through a park. In cases where Proust leaves the more traditional narrative storytelling and drifts into social analysis, history, and philosophy, i.e. a substantial proportion of the novel, multiple re-reads of the same half page sentence may be required for full comprehension.

    So to summarize: in addition to being very, very long, Proust is also a slow read, with extra effort required to comprehend and absorb.

    I have read other major works by so-called “difficult” writers, e.g. James Joyce’s Ulysses and Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain, but while those are substantial novels, none of them require the sustained reading effort of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. Recognizing the need to pace myself for a marathon, not a sprint, I decided to take it one book at a time (Proust’s novel is split into 7 physical books) and deliberately planned to read a different, less taxing book in between each Proust installment. Read in that way, it took me one full year of my limited lifespan to read Proust, although only 230 actual days were spent on the translated texts.

    So that is How I read Proust, but the better question – and the one I will focus on for the rest of this essay - is whether I Should have read Proust at all. Is reading Proust worth the effort, worth the time, worth focusing on at the exclusion of all the other works of literature that I did not read over those 230 days? Admittedly, one of the reasons I did read In Search of Lost Time is the same reason people climb Everest: if you enjoy testing yourself against mountains, there is nothing taller to climb. And I can not deny, completing such a gargantuan work is extremely satisfying, but what do I take away from the experience beyond my personal triumph over literary hardship. I mean, was the book any good?

    There are myriad novel elements worth discussing. While Proust’s prose can be tortured, it can also be lyrical and lovely. For someone who apparently had crippling allergies, Proust was a master of flower description:

Before reaching it we would be met on our way by the scent of his lilac-trees, come out to welcome strangers. Out of the fresh little green hearts of their foliage the lilacs raised inquisitively over the fence of the park their plumes of white or purple blossom, which glowed, even in the shade, with the sunlight in which they had been bathed. Some of them, half-concealed by the little tiled house, called the Archers’ Lodge, in which Swann’s keeper lived, overtopped its gothic gable with their rosy minaret. The nymphs of spring would have seemed coarse and vulgar in comparison with these young houris, who retained, in this French garden, the pure and vivid colouring of a Persian miniature. Despite my desire to throw my arms about their pliant forms and to draw down towards me the starry locks that crowned their fragrant heads, we would pass them by without stopping - Swann’s Way

People interested in history will find the impact and reverberations of both World War I and the Dreyfus Affair on French society revealing:

I confess it would be very irritating to die before the end of the Dreyfus Affair. Those scum have more than one trick up their sleeves. I don't doubt they'll be beaten in the end, but they're very influential, they've got support everywhere. Just when it's going best, everything gives way. I'd like to live long enough to see Dreyfus rehabilitated and Picquart a colonel. - Sodom and Gomorrah

Similarly, Proust’s exploration of homosexuality as a gay man pretending to be straight, condemning the behavior while simultaneously bringing it out of shadows, is a fascinating window into the evolution and history of western tolerance of gayness (or “inverts” as Proust labeled them):

He belonged to that race of beings, less contradictory than they appear to be, whose ideal is virile precisely because their temperament is feminine, and who are in life like other men in appearance only; …A race on which a malediction weighs, and which must deny its God, since, even if Christian, when they stand arraigned at the bar of the court they must, before Christ and in his name, defend themselves, as if from calumny, from what is their life itself; sons without a mother, to whom they are obliged to lie even in the hour when they close her eyes; friends without friendships, notwithstanding all those that their frequently acknowledged charm inspires, and which their often kindly hearts would respond to; but can we give the name of friendships to relationships that vegetate only by virtue of a lie, and and from which the first impulse of trust and sincerity that they might be tempted to show would cause them to be rejected in disgust.  - Sodom and Gomorrah

Considering this work’s scope, it would be surprising if Proust hadn’t managed to include many worthwhile elements.

        However, to really answer this question of literary merit, I need to describe what I found to be the three major components of In Search of Lost Time, the elements of the work the reader will spend most of their experience digesting: 1) the chronicling, lampooning, and dissection of the French aristocracy, 2) a deep dive into the interconnected worlds of passion, grief, and jealousy, and 3) the exploration of memory, sensation, art, and time. 

1)     If you pick up Proust, expect to spend and inordinate amount of time hanging around a wide variety of Parisian salons, either rubbing elbows with the aristocracy or groups of middle class bohemians that merely aspire to rub elbows with aristocrats (despite their protestations otherwise). Following a tradition that goes back to Balzac, Proust probes deeply into the morass of French socialites, exposing all their spite, foolishness and pettiness. Vindictive rumor spreading and gossip, like this from the Duchess de Guermantes, is the rule of the day:

“She's not a dreadful person, but, believe me, she's unimaginably boring. She gives me such a headache each day that I'm forever having to take painkillers. And it's all because Basin took it into his head to go to bed with her behind my back for a year or so. And if that wasn't enough, I've got a footman who's in love with a little slut and goes about sulking if I don't ask the young lady to quit her streetwalking profits for half an hour and come and have tea with me! It's enough to drive one mad!" the Duchess concluded languidly. - The Guermantes Way

At the same time, Proust can’t help but to also celebrate and elevate the Faubourg Saint-Germain (French shorthand for the aristocracy, derived from where they live in Paris), enamored by their connection to history. Over the course of the novel, we see a steady diminution of these French Dukes and Princes, as they are dragged into the 20th century and are forced to marry rich “commoners” to sustain their empty lifestyles.

        These French socialite sections of the novel contain most of the humor, filled with bumbling caricatures and empty-headed nobles attempting culture and wit. In this passage Proust describes a simple handshake, elevated into absurdity by his aristocratic friend:

when the Guermantes in question, after a lightning tour of the last hiding places of your soul and your integrity, had deemed you worthy to consort with him in future, his hand, directed toward you at the end of an arm stretched out to its full length, seemed to be presenting a rapier for single combat, and the hand was in fact placed so far in front of the Guermantes himself at that moment that when he proceeded to bow his head it was difficult to distinguish whether it was yourself or his own hand he was acknowledging. - The Guermantes Way

While these sections read quickly, they generally feel empty of the gravitas, complexity, and insight of the rest of the novel. I have no complaint with a bit of levity breaking things up, but these fancy parties take up a very large percentage of the book. I would not be surprised to find that half the book is spent with the narrator calmly ignoring the idiocy being spouted from one ignorant aristocratic snob after another. It is without a doubt a damning and exhaustive critique of the French aristocracy and socialite society of the La Belle Époque (1871-1914), but as an American living in the 21st century, the level of coverage in this novel seems a vast overkill. I kept wanting to say: I get it. The aristocracy is fading and they are almost all terrible people. Do we need more than a thousand pages (in a 3000 page novel) to get that point across?

2)     Proust’s original conception of this novel was a treatise on memory and time using fictionalized elements of his life, intercut with his take down of the aristocracy. That novel only needed 3 parts (as opposed to the eventual 7) and looked as if it was going to come in at just over a thousand or so pages. But then World War I happened and printing books of this sort stopped, giving Proust five years to further develop what he wanted this novel to be. What he did was to take a minor character, Albertine, and raise her up to become the major love of his narrator's life, which gave Proust the material he needed for a profound exploration of human passion, grief, and jealousy. Two of the new books, The Prisoner (book 5) and The Fugitive (book 6), are largely focused on this single relationship which covers roughly another thousand pages spread out across the entire novel. 

       Falling in love is a universal human experience that most people go through. It is often connected to some of the best and worst memories we have, which provides some obvious material for Proust to dig into for his exploration of memory. The problem in the case of Proust, is that his conception of what motivates passion, love, and commitment does not align very well with my personal lived experience. A major theme in Proust is that we want what we do not have, but become disappointed when we get it. While I agree with this to a point, Proust seems to take this notion to an extreme. He really focuses on possession:

women who tend to be resistant and cannot be possessed at once, of whom indeed it is not immediately clear that they can ever be possessed at all, are the only interesting ones. For to know them, to approach them, to conquer them is to make the human image vary in shape, in size, in relief, a lesson in relativity in the appreciation of a woman's body, a joy to see anew when it has regained its slender outline against the backdrop of reality. Women who are first encountered in a brothel are of no interest, because they remain static. - Guermantes Way

The moment he possesses someone, he becomes immediately bored with them. His interest is only rekindled, when he feels that thing he possesses is going to be taken away from him. He slowly comes to understand this means he can never be truly satisfied: 

I felt…that seeking happiness through satisfying my inner desires was as naive as undertaking to reach a horizon by simply walking forward in a straight line. The more desire advances, the more true possession recedes. So that if it is possible to obtain happiness, or at least freedom from suffering, what we should seek is not the satisfaction, but the gradual reduction and final elimination of desire. - The Fugitive

Albertine becomes his biggest, life defining passion because he lives such a large portion of their relationship in constant fear and jealousy that she will leave him for someone else, which is doubly antagonizing because that mysterious stranger might be a lesbian, which I guess also turns him on… which only makes him more jealous? Proust does get that people have kinks.

        Proust’s obsession is entirely internal. His narrator never appears to attempt open communication with anyone in his life, man or woman. The novel is an intense examination of the origins of jealousy and of the thought processes and obsessions that drive extreme jealousy:

Jealousy is also a demon that cannot be exorcised and always reappears, clad in a new form. Even if we managed to exterminate them all, to hold on to the one we loved for ever, the Evil One would take on a new, still more pathetic form: despair at having been able to win her fidelity only by force, despair at not belong loved. - The Prisoner

Jealousy is often nothing but an uneasy desire for domination, applied in the context of love. - The Prisoner

        While I personally don’t see my relationships in terms of possession (or at least, not to the extreme the narrator does), this sort of all-consuming jealousy is a very real thing that we regularly see out in the world and in people we know well, so Proust does deliver some useful insight into the human condition. I would also point out that while his love side of the equation might be icky with its demands of male total control, Proust’s exploration of grief and loss seems more universal and less off putting. He basically goes through the five stages of grief 50 years before On Death and Dying author Elisabeth Kübler-Ross came up with it. For instance, here he is in the fifth stage, Depression:

I cannot even say that what made me feel the loss of all those moments of utter sweetness, which nothing could ever bring back to me, was actually despair. In order to despair of this life, when we see that it will be irremediably unhappy for evermore, we must still desire to cling to it. - The Fugitive

More generally, I would describe Proust’s narrator (and probably Proust himself) as more disconnected from human interconnectivity than the typical person. The author did spend the last ten years of his life living like a hermit in a sound-proofed apartment. While his works are clear windows into memory, art, and grief, I think his views into passion and love are rather cloudy and disjointed, tainted by his own inability to connect deeply with his fellow man. With the addition of Albertine, he spends a lot of time – and pages – working on a universal guide to human intimacy that feels decidedly non-universal and is really more of a case study delving deep into certain broken people.

3)     The main purpose of In Search of Lost Time is to explore human memory and how it connects to our experience of time. From the earliest pages of the novel, Proust works to pull us back into early childhood memories: a young boy who can’t go to sleep without a good night kiss from his mother. Early on he also introduces us to the concept of the Proustian moment, the occasional mind lock we experience when a physical sensation – taste of a cookie, smell of wet earth, feel of a wobbly stepping stone – immediately pulls us directly back to a memory of the past when we felt that same sensation:

She sent out for one of those short, plump little cakes called 'petites madeleines,' which look as though they had been moulded in the fluted scallop of a pilgrim's shell. And soon, mechanically, weary after a dull day with the prospect of a depressing morrow, I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. No sooner had the warm liquid, and the crumbs with it, touched my palate, a shudder ran through my whole body, and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary changes that were taking place. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, but individual, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory--this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me, it was myself. I had ceased now to feel mediocre, accidental, mortal. Whence could it have come to me, this all-powerful joy? - Swann’s Way

The importance of such moments is that they bypass the normal process of memory, which our brains have organized and edited over time as we age. We are different people then the people we were in our youth and that is partly due to the fact we constantly re-contextualize our memories based on later experiences. A lot of the novel is spent helping us understand this constant death and rebirth of who we are, as the narrator constantly reevaluates his own desires, fears, and goals as he changes with time. Once we finally comprehend how memory is anything but objective and that the past is past and it is lost, that we have moved on… that is when the narrator revisits these Proustian moments, arguing that a memory accessed in this way – through a sensation – is actually a direct line to the past “being” you were, untainted by any of the more recent versions of you:

This being had only ever come to me, only ever manifested itself to me on the occasions, outside of action and immediate pleasure, when the miracle of an analogy had made me escape from the present. It alone had the power to make me find the old days again, the lost time, in the face of which the efforts of my memory and my intellect always failed. - Finding Time Again

This sensation memory bypass is a direct pathway to the past, and that means that there are ways to be free of time and, indirectly, death. And while we are still reeling from this revelation, Proust couples these direct connections to past selves to something essential about life and what it is to be human:

[the essence of things] languishes in the observation of the present where the senses cannot bring this to it, in the consideration of a past where the intelligence desiccates it, and in the expectation of a future which the will constructs out of fragments of the present and the past from which it extracts even more of their reality without retaining any more than is useful for the narrowly human, utilitarian ends that it assigns to them. - Finding Time Again

Pure memory, unsoiled by rational analysis, is a gateway into something universal, something that can be shared with one’s fellow man in a way that experiences filtered by all the broken baggage and biases we all haul around can not be shared. And sharing those moments where you touch the universe and transcend yourself: that is art:

It is only through art that we can escape from ourselves and know how another person sees a universe which is not the same as our own and whose landscapes would otherwise have remained as unknown as any there may be on the moon. Thanks to art, ... we ... have at our disposal as many worlds as there are original artists. - Finding Time Again

That is why he is writing this book in the first place.

    While I might debate some of the logical connections Proust has made, there is no doubt that these observations are profound. Because the author has laid such extensive groundwork – over the course of the novel he lays bare his entire life, every friendship, every love, every death – these conclusions hit hard. We see how the narrator at 5 years old is different than the adolescent narrator who is different than the narrator at 20, 35, 50… He doesn’t just describe his alterations with age. It is a 3000 page novel. We live the changes with him. So when he finally shows us the universal elements that run continuously through his life, it does ring true. Considering the years and years of writing and re-writing, the interruptions of wars, and the eventual death of the author before final proofing and publishing, it is absolutely astonishing how cohesive and self-reinforcing the main thematic argument holds. If there is greatness in this novel, this is it.

    But again, the question is not whether In Search of Lost Time has good stuff in it. It clearly does. But considering the time investment and mental effort involved, is it worth the time? Should other readers climb this mountain? Obviously, the answer will depend on the reader, so now that we have spread out all the elements, let’s do the math and recap, this time hitting the novel elements in order of effectiveness.

    The primary theme of memory and time is masterfully laid out, reverberates throughout the novel, and is delivered through the experiences of the narrator interacting with an epic cavalcade of interesting characters. In the final sequence the narrator is approximately my own age (the age at which Proust died), which is probably the perfect age to be hit hardest by his look back over his life not-so-well lived. I can’t guarantee others will find it as profound a work as I did, but I think there is clear evidence that it works for a good percentage of the literary world.

    Proust’s viewpoint on passion is very male and tied strongly to feelings of possession. While I identified with the narrator’s young, lusty adolescent self, as he grew older I found his love increasingly creepy and misanthropic. The trip down the jealousy rabbit hole is nearly bottomless, and the sheer extent of it really wore me down. The narrator is constantly trying to get one to agree that this is how love works, but he never really made that case for me. So while not worthless as a study in obsession, I’m not sure I would recommend this long jealousy journey on its own.

    The least satisfying element for me was the deconstruction of the French aristocracy and Parisian socialite circles. As an American far removed from the French classes and society of 100 years ago, the decline of these high status/low intelligence snobs just didn’t have a lot for me. Yes, it was sometimes funny. Yes, there were some good characters and good character moments. But there were also extensive descriptions of lineage, types of wit, and gradations of social circles that dragged on and on. I think in its time and place – early 20th century Paris – this sort of scathing, upper crust take down must have been riveting, but for its length I could have done without it.

    So to sum up and ridiculously simplify: the three main elements are excellent, ok, and blah. The problem is that Proust has intertwined all these elements. I tried to think of a way I could abridge In Search of Lost Time (others have tried). Were there books or passages I could suggest that would give just the Proustian highlights? I don’t think it is possible. One could cut back on some of the conversations at the salons or one could halve the jealous hand-wringing, but it would have to be done sentence by sentence, as all sorts of important elements are weaved throughout. Every character you cut and every behavior you removed will make the novel less complex, less epic, and provide less evidence for the final bringing together of all the threads. So I do think you need to take it all, or not at all.

    To get to the punchline, the title of this piece was all one big tease. I am not going to tell you if you should read In Search of Lost Time. Hopefully I gave enough details that you can make that decision for yourself. The novel is real work, with several elements that were not entirely satisfying to me, but it is also a truly masterful, epic, and profound work. I am glad to have read it, but there are enough bumps in its road that I can only recommend it with caution. As a final note, if you are still pondering taking on a truly gigantic novel, I will say I liked both War and Peace and Les Miserables better, so if you haven’t tried those, maybe work your way up to Proust.

The Longest Sentence in French Literature*

Their honor precarious, their liberty provisional, lasting only until the discovery of their crime; their position unstable, like that of the poet who one day was feasted at every table, applauded in every theatre in London, and on the next was driven from every lodging, unable to find a pillow upon which to lay his head, turning the mill like Samson and saying like him: “The two sexes shall die, each in a place apart!”; excluded even, save on the days of general disaster when the majority rally round the victim as the Jews rallied round Dreyfus, from the sympathy—at times from the society—of their fellows, in whom they inspire only disgust at seeing themselves as they are, portrayed in a mirror which, ceasing to flatter them, accentuates every blemish that they have refused to observe in themselves, and makes them understand that what they have been calling their love (a thing to which, playing upon the word, they have by association annexed all that poetry, painting, music, chivalry, asceticism have contrived to add to love) springs not from an ideal of beauty which they have chosen but from an incurable malady; like the Jews again (save some who will associate only with others of their race and have always on their lips ritual words and consecrated pleasantries), shunning one another, seeking out those who are most directly their opposite, who do not desire their company, pardoning their rebuffs, moved to ecstasy by their condescension; but also brought into the company of their own kind by the ostracism that strikes them, the opprobrium under which they have fallen, having finally been invested, by a persecution similar to that of Israel, with the physical and moral characteristics of a race, sometimes beautiful, often hideous, finding (in spite of all the mockery with which he who, more closely blended with, better assimilated to the opposing race, is relatively, in appearance, the least inverted, heaps upon him who has remained more so) a relief in frequenting the society of their kind, and even some corroboration of their own life, so much so that, while steadfastly denying that they are a race (the name of which is the vilest of insults), those who succeed in concealing the fact that they belong to it they readily unmask, with a view less to injuring them, though they have no scruple about that, than to excusing themselves; and, going in search (as a doctor seeks cases of appendicitis) of cases of inversion in history, taking pleasure in recalling that Socrates was one of themselves, as the Israelites claim that Jesus was one of them, without reflecting that there were no abnormals when homosexuality was the norm, no anti-Christians before Christ, that the disgrace alone makes the crime because it has allowed to survive only those who remained obdurate to every warning, to every example, to every punishment, by virtue of an innate disposition so peculiar that it is more repugnant to other men (even though it may be accompanied by exalted moral qualities) than certain other vices which exclude those qualities, such as theft, cruelty, breach of faith, vices better understood and so more readily excused by the generality of men; forming a freemasonry far more extensive, more powerful and less suspected than that of the Lodges, for it rests upon an identity of tastes, needs, habits, dangers, apprenticeship, knowledge, traffic, glossary, and one in which the members themselves, who intend not to know one another, recognize one another immediately by natural or conventional, involuntary or deliberate signs which indicate one of his congeners to the beggar in the street, in the great nobleman whose carriage door he is shutting, to the father in the suitor for his daughter’s hand, to him who has sought healing, absolution, defense, in the doctor, the priest, the barrister to whom he has had recourse; all of them obliged to protect their own secret but having their part in a secret shared with the others, which the rest of humanity does not suspect and which means that to them the most wildly improbable tales of adventure seem true, for in this romantic, anachronistic life the ambassador is a bosom friend of the felon, the prince, with a certain independence of action with which his aristocratic breeding has furnished him, and which the trembling little peasant would lack, on leaving the duchess’s party goes off to confer in private with the hooligan; a reprobate part of the human whole, but an important part, suspected where it does not exist, flaunting itself, insolent and unpunished, where its existence is never guessed; numbering its adherents everywhere, among the people, in the army, in the church, in the prison, on the throne; living, in short, at least to a great extent, in a playful and perilous intimacy with the men of the other race, provoking them, playing with them by speaking of its vice as of something alien to it; a game that is rendered easy by the blindness or duplicity of the others, a game that may be kept up for years until the day of the scandal, on which these lion-tamers are devoured; until then, obliged to make a secret of their lives, to turn away their eyes from the things on which they would naturally fasten them, to fasten them upon those from which they would naturally turn away, to change the gender of many of the words in their vocabulary, a social constraint, slight in comparison with the inward constraint which their vice, or what is improperly so called, imposes upon them with regard not so much now to others as to themselves, and in such a way that to themselves it does not appear a vice.

-- Sodom and Gomorrah by Marcel Proust

* If one researches longest sentence in literature, you will find that there is a 13,955-word sentence found in Jonathan Coe's Rotter’s Club (2001), which surpasses the famous 4,391-word soliloquy by Molly Bloom in James Joyce's Ulysses (1922). Both of these are stream of consciousness sentences, where the lack of sentence ending punctuation indicates the unending behavior of a mind just running from one thought to the next. Proust’s insane sentence is an (assumedly) straight-faced attempt to encapsulate the full complexity of a very complex thought in a single sentence. Discounting stream-of-consciousness and sentence stunts, Proust’s sentence is likely the true long sentence champion in any language.