Slogging through Proust's "In Search Of Lost Time," a/k/a "Remembrance of Things Past"

By Jack Brummet

I am beginning the final volume (7) of Proust's Remembrance Of Things Past. 3,031 pages, and 1,267,069 words. It's has been beautiful and infuriating and puzzling at times. I'm glad I did this with our book club because I would have probably weaseled out otherwise. it is also pretty interesting to be in a book club with three philosophy professors, a lawyer, two cool and smart professional women - one of who is a philosopher too-and one knucklehead, yours truly. So, this sentence from book five is pretty typical, and illustrative of why this book is such a slog. It gets way more dense, but never more Hemingwayesque. I've found I need to read three other books between each Proust volume (with at least one of those being some trashy genre fiction) to cleanse the palate.

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