French Novelist Marcel Proust (1871-1922)

There are a handful of writers who have been a major influence in my life. They include William Shakespeare, Jorge Luis Borges, Honoré de Balzac, and G. K. Chesterton. Also Marcel Proust, whose seven-volume In Search of Lost Time I am reading for the third time. God grant that I may have a fourth go at Proust’s masterpiece.

I have always felt that one of the things that makes fiction great is that the main characters are able to change within the course of the work. For example, in Hamlet, we see the Danish prince resolve to revenge his father’s death. This is followed by Hamlet waffling and even leaving the country. When he returns, he fights a duel that becomes a massacre as summarized by the song “That’s Entertainment!” from the 1953 MGM musical The Bandwagon:

Some great Shakespearean scene
Where a ghost and a prince meet
And everyone ends in mincemeat.

In Search of Lost Time is about a boy named Marcel (last name not given) who fantasizes endlessly about young women, most particularly about Oriane, Duchesse de Guermantes, whose family were originally based in the village of Combray, where Marcel spends his first years. Over seven volumes, we see Marcel pursue first Gilberte, then Albertine, then Mlle de Stermaria, and even the Duchesse de Guermantes.

In The Guermantes Way, the third novel in the series, Proust ponders the strange disconnect between desire and reality:

Thus did the blank spaces of my memory gradually fill with names that, as they arranged and composed themselves in relation to one another, and as the connections between them became more and more numerous, resembled those perfected works of art in which there is not a single brush stroke that does not contribute to the whole, and in which every element in turn receives from the rest a justification it confers on them in turn.

I never said that Proust is an easy read, In fact, his work is among the most difficult ever written. That does not deter me from reading and re-reading his work. It’s no picnic, but the rewards are great. For me, the rewards have been coming over the decades since 1976, when I first started reading him.