Reading Proust has been the biggest personal project I set out to complete this year — and I finally managed to finish it on the very last day of October.
Effort was never really the concern with a project like this; it was more about how to engage with such an immense text — especially one that often unfolds through endless conversations and digressions meant to capture an entire society. Proust himself explains how he wanted to execute this monumental idea, and it’s clear how much labor went into transforming years of journaling and note-taking into something coherent and profoundly readable.
At one point, he mentions that only two women in the novel are drawn directly from real life, claiming everyone else is fictional — which is, of course, not entirely true. His portrayal of aristocratic life and its decline during the war is initially off-putting, but as you read on, you see why he lingers there: for the humor, the subtle character studies, and ultimately to show how those old classes were gradually replaced in post-war Europe.
There are many deaths in the novel, and at least two struck me as unexpectedly powerful. The death of his grandmother — whom Edmund White notes is modeled after Proust’s own mother — is deeply moving. She is the kindest presence in Marcel’s life, and the scene of her loyal servant preparing her body for others to see remains one of the most tender in the entire work. Then there’s Saint-Loup’s death, which Proust first narrates and then later adds more emotional dimensions to. I thought Albertine’s death would devastate me — it takes up so many pages — but it left me surprisingly unmoved. The most affecting for me this time, however, was Bergotte’s — his sudden collapse and death in an art gallery, while reflecting on the transience of his own work, is described with such quiet subtlety that it genuinely moved me.
This was my second time through the series, roughly 10–12 years after the first. Naturally, the impact of many scenes has changed completely.
There were moments I hadn’t paid much attention to before that now stood out vividly — the night Paris was bombed, with Marcel walking home from the establishment where Charlus was being tortured for pleasure; or Gilberte joining the resistance against the Germans in Combray. Knowing now that Proust was gay in real life adds entirely new dimensions to many of these passages — the encounters with “random girls,” the hidden lives of others, the coded observations about desire. Even Saint-Loup’s late revelation as gay, which I initially found clumsy, now feels purposeful and thematically consistent.
That said, I found Books 4, 5, and 6 rather tedious this time — especially the latter two. The first three volumes and Time Regained, the final one, still hold tremendous re-reading value. I can easily imagine returning to Time Regained again in the coming years.