Reading "In Search of Lost Time"

You will spend 70 days in a row with this man, and you will be charmed and offended and amazed and sometimes bored, but you will be lucky.

By Jane Smiley

Aug 28, 2005 | After I finished "In Search of Lost Time," I called the real literary types that I happen to know -- the ones who make their livings by being famously well-read -- and I asked them if they had read the whole thing, too. Mostly this was to introduce the idea that I had read the whole thing -- but I thought it was a good idea to first show deference to their superior reading programs before happening to mention this accomplishment with which I had impressed myself. Mais non! as they say in France. Yet all of them knew someone who had read all seven volumes; that person was Richard Howard, who introduces the Modern Library edition of the novel. I wondered: Could he be the only one other than me and Alain de Botton, who wrote "How Proust Can Change Your Life"? If so, I am here to tell you, we are a lucky group, and it is time for you to begin, because reading all of Proust is not hard.

First, you buy all seven volumes in a uniform edition -- mine came in a six-book set -- and you arrange them in a row next to your bed, the bathtub or your favorite chair, wherever you are most comfortable reading. For a few days, let's say no longer than a week, you glance at them from time to time and pick them up and look at the covers. You can even flip the pages -- but don't read anything. You are familiarizing yourself with this new acquaintance. You are coming to recognize his appeal. You are letting him impose upon you, because for the next 70 days or so, you are going to organize your free time around him.

You are going to find that he is both more friendly and more alien than you ever imagined. You are going to be charmed and also offended, sometimes disapproving, and occasionally bored. Quite often you are going to be impressed -- his capacity for thinking things through is going to seem almost infinitely great. Mostly, though, if you are like I was, you are going to come to anticipate your daily what? -- Dose? Encounter? Immersion? Meditation? -- with greater and greater eagerness but also greater and greater languor. You are going to come, at least in your own way, to feel French. When you have finished "In Search of Lost Time," you will be convinced that you know something visceral about Frenchness, and that that knowledge is important.

Of course everyone knows that "In Search of Lost Time" begins with a madeleine dipped in tea, except that it doesn't. It begins with falling asleep while reading a book. Someone, "I," a voice who occasionally calls himself "M.," closes his eyes and wakes up a half-hour later, thinking that his book is still in his hands, and by a process of association, begins to think about all sorts of things: the time, an imagined traveler, the comfort of his bed. He sleeps again and is reminded of earlier nights and long ago dreams. The first event he relates is one that happens to have been singular in what seems to be a lonely childhood; unable to sleep and longing for his mother, he is discovered on the stairs by his parents as they go up to bed after a late evening of socializing with their neighbor, Swann. M. expects to be disciplined ("Too late: my father was upon us. Instinctively, I murmured, though no one heard me, 'I'm done for!'"), but he is not. The normally strict father is sympathetic and merciful, and suggests that M.'s beloved mother spend the night with the child.

In order to pass the time, she reads him a novel by George Sand; already his literary sensibility is at work -- "Beneath the everyday incidents, the ordinary objects and common words, I sensed a strange and individual tone of voice." And so have you. Fifty-five pages in, and something has happened. In 10 more pages, you will have done your first day's reading without getting to the madeleine, but Proust's rhythm is well established. It is, let's say, andante: measured, conversational, even ordinary, but seductive and intimate. And that constitutes his promise for all of the 4,200 pages left to go -- his seven volumes will be seductive, intimate, measured and conversational in a way that was unprecedented in the novel of his day and unmatched since.

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