The next up on my reading of the 305 greatest books is In Search of Lost Time (AKA Remembrance of Things Past) by Marcel Proust. The book can be found on the Norwegian, Observer, and Zane Top 10 Book Lists.
In Search of Lost Time holds a couple of places in my heart. First and foremost, it is by far the longest book I have ever read. It is ranked as one of the longest books ever written and clocks in over 4,000 pages depending on the print and page size. However a better estimate is the word count which is 1.175 million words. For comparison War and Peace has only 0.56 million words. So this book is essentially two War and Peace length books. It also took me over a year to read because it is a brain strain. He writes in VERY long sentences. Counting out the words of one notable sentence had me at 203 words for that sentence alone.
The book itself is broken down into seven volumes (these seven were then places into the four physical volumes that I had read and pictured above). The first volume of the story is probably the most famous and is often read as a standalone story, Swann's Way, however it was never meant as its own story. The text is also formatted without many paragraphs, about one per every two pages, and conversations flowed within the paragraphs instead of being seperated out into unique line breaks, as is the standard format. This means it generally took me about an hour to read 20 dense pages and I was often mentally exhausted after that from trying to follow the story. Another note of accomplishment is that this book was the last of the Zane's Top 10 books for me to finish, marking the first list I have successfully completed.
The story itself was ... interesting. It follows the remembrance of Proust's own life through his memories. And while the story generally flows in chronological order, he had a tendency to have tangential thoughts for pages at a time, where he will jump forward in time or ponder some theoretical question he had been grappling with. While I enjoyed the linear part of the story, the theoretical parts got to be a bit old after a while, especially when he would re-harp on the same essential questions over and over again. This story was also surprisingly "modern", with the author extensively tackling the subject of homosexuality. For a novel written in the early 1900's I was not expecting this pervasive look at homosexuality of the time. Here is though, one of the primary problems I had with the central part of the story. This is when the main character, presumably Proust himself, essentially kept his girlfriend "kidnapped" (for lack of a better word) in his house because he had assumed she was sleeping around with other women and he was jealous (maybe?). He would ponder many times over if she liked women, for 100's of pages at a time, with him never satisfactorily answering his own question (however as the reader I felt it was satisfactorily proven a yes). Many of the men also in the book led secretive homosexual lives, with one engaging in full on sadomasochistic acts during the latter parts of the novel. When he first delves into this aspect of the book he seemed to be weighing the morality of it, however eventually it seemed to me that he had accepted that side of society and proceeded right along (except when related to his girlfriend). Like I said, while this was completely unexpected, it was definitely not unappreciated on my part.
While there were parts of the story that were repeated ad nauseum, there were many parts I found fascinating. As time went by, we had the evolution of technology and how it changed. From the first telephones through the widespread use of the automobile, and how they impacted the characters lives. But time in this book was tricky, where it wasn't until the end of the book that I understood that this was all written as his memories. Time fluctuated through the book sporadically, to the point that you never really knew how much time had passed at any given point. Parties he attended took 100's of pages to depict but then years would fly by in the blink of a page. The book was also very "real", where deaths just happened as in real life, with most happening without a satisfactory reason that one would often find in stories. And for a book that seemingly went on forever there were many aspects that never got explained. There was a contemporary court case, often known as the Dreyfus Affair, that was constantly brought up and influenced the characters majorly, but was never actually explained within the story itself. Proust mentioned many times about his infirmity, but barely delved into what exactly he had. And there were other things that Proust felt he didn't need to explain, I assume because he felt a contemporary audience would understand. The book also didn't really have the flow of a "normal" novel. There was no literary action. There was no definitive conclusion. It just sort of winds down at the end, which presumably was when he started writing the book (since this was his memoirs of a sort).
Overall this is a difficult book to sum up and recommend to people. It is a monumental task to undertake and finish. It is also a difficult book to engage with and consistently stay engaged with. However finishing it I feel like I summited a literary mountain that I will proudly wave my flag upon. So while I am proud to have finished it and I found it worthwhile for the most part, I don't think I could recommend it to others to tackle unless they wanted the same goals as I.
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