Remembrance of Things Past

Also known as:

I started reading this book with much scepticism on my part. The volume of the work (4200 pages) is in itself prohibitive since I get too little time to read, and I prefer non-fiction more. Now, my reading is often a public act; people regularly ask me what I am reading. That is easy to answer. However, some of them are readers themselves. Often, they follow up with a question to know what I am getting out of it/what this book is about.

One may say that it is not important for fiction. Well, that is not entirely true. At least, one must get the entertainment out of the most light readings. And when you read 4 thousand pages of fiction, you'd better get something more. I have learned more about anarchy from V for Vendetta than from all the works by Noam Chomsky I have read. Human failings in the political landscape are much more well explained in 1984 and Animal Farm than in many political treatises.

Finding Time Again_ In Search of Lost Time, Volume 7

I was thinking of those who would read it as my readers. For they were not, as I saw it, my readers, so much as readers of their own selves, my book being merely one of those magnifying glasses of the sort the optician at Combray used to offer his customers; my book, but a books thanks to which I would be providing them with the means of reading within themselves.

We can see what Proust thought about this book at the end of the last volume of this work as cited above. This is very true. Although events in this work happened in a time in society now virtually non-existent, the work itself is an internal monologue, a retrospective introspection.

Instead of giving us something, Proust involves us.

The word 'involvement' requires some qualifications. In great Russian novels, we find writers as omnipresent observers of events and explaining a deeper understanding of human affairs now and then; here we are in the driver's seat. Proust and his character are really mischievous map-readers trying to navigate us through the unknown alleys of our soul. Some of them are full of pettiness, some are dark. Some are evil, to say the least.

And that is not all. The involvement requires practice. The volume of this book will let you practice being Marcel. Marcel– who is vain and jealous but sincere regarding art. Marcel the tormentor and tormented. Marcel– who laments and is both dazzled and bored in society.

Among all those aforementioned things, boredom is the hardest thing to produce. It is risky, too. However, Proust used almost three of the seven volumes to produce a long monotony, inducing a sense of utter uselessness of 'society', just so one can understand Marcel's position better.