In Search of Lost Time (French: À la recherche du temps perdu) is a monumental novel in seven volumes by French author Marcel Proust, written between 1909 and the author’s death in 1922. Weighing in at 3200 pages, it really is a magnum opus and indeed was Proust’s life’s work (his only other novel, the earlier Jean Santeuil, was unfinished and was something of a prototype since it contained many of the themes and motifs that he would deploy later). So, has your blogger gone above and beyond and read the whole thing? Of course not! However, I have recently read volume one, Swann’s Way, and judging by the quality of writing and the enjoyable way I was sucked into his world, who knows, I may yet attempt the whole series, in time.

My version is in English of course, rather than the original French, and so a word should be said about the quality of the translation. This definitive translation was rendered by Scotsman C K Scott Moncrieff whose job it was to use the appropriate phraseology and le mot juste to reliably capture the essence of the Proustian text in English. To illustrate how this may differ, consider his original title Remembrance of Things Past, compared with what publishers latterly decided upon, the more literal In Search of Lost Time.

The theme of the book is signalled by this title: the nature of memory. Despite the book being fictional, Proust’s childhood and early adulthood in late 19th century and early 20th century high society France must have been plundered prodigiously: the detail is extraordinary and you could be forgiven for believing you are reading a true autobiography, and that the fictional town of Combray, in which most of the events take place, was a real French town. Throughout the book are instances of “involuntary memory”, that is, vivid memories conjured up for the narrator by sensory experiences such as sights, sounds and smells. Perhaps the most famous of these occurs early in Swann’s Way, namely the “episode of the madeleine”, which I reproduce here:

No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, 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 me. … Whence did it come? What did it mean? How could I seize and apprehend it? … And suddenly the memory revealed itself. The taste was that of the little piece of madeleine which on Sunday mornings at Combray (because on those mornings I did not go out before mass), when I went to say good morning to her in her bedroom, my aunt Léonie used to give me, dipping it first in her own cup of tea or tisane. The sight of the little madeleine had recalled nothing to my mind before I tasted it. And all from my cup of tea.