The Booklist is a weekly newsletter for book lovers from books editor Jason Steger. Like the narrator himself, our reading of In Search of Lost Time – its pleasures, challenges, and rewards – will change and grow in richness across time, and perhaps this is the true genius of Marcel Proust’s fiction. Any life lessons then would likely have been lost on me. First edition, first printing of the first volume in Prousts la Recherche du Temps. I don’t think there is a right age to read the novel. Item 407620 Du Ct de Chez Swann Swanns Way. Perhaps if I had read Proust in my 20s, I might have wised up faster about jealousy and possessive love. Swanns Way by Marcel Proust is one of the most influential novels of the twentieth century. And, having first failed in my late 20s, at times I had felt slightly ashamed ever to have made so little headway. In his memoir How to Make Gravy, Paul Kelly recalls spending large chunks of his 24th year reading In Search of Lost Time, “like a caterpillar munching a giant leaf”. So too was an episode of the Backlisted Podcast, which proposed a less reverential approach to the novel. Paintings in Proust by Eric Karpeles was an invaluable companion, revealing the frequent allusions to paintings and artists. Did I have to check the who’s who now and then? Certainly.
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