Perennial Proust

100 years ago a book about memory appeared. It was called Du côté de chez Swann and it began a vast seven-volume journey À la recherche du temps perdu. It is no secret that I, like many, have been struggling to complete Proust's epic for a great many years, nearly as many as it took him to write it and his publishers to release and every one of its volumes – Le Temps retrouvé appeared in 1927. Yet every time I return to those pages – I am now nearing the end of Le Côté de Guermantes – it is as if time has stood still, that the Monsieur and Madame de Guermantes, the Princesse de Parma, my literary crush Robert de Saint-Loup and all their crowd have frozen in time.

The mores remain the same, even though Proust marked the shifts and strains of the belle époque. The food, detailed in Shirley King's Dining with Marcel Proust, is still presented in the same extraordinary moulds, on identical Limoges porcelain. The Vinteuil Sonata plays in the background and an air of passive aggression hangs over the scene, as decorum is observed and ignored in equal measure. The Baron de Charlus causes a few frissons, not least with his sexuality. Indeed, by secreting himself in his cork-lined room, Proust had indeed achieved the impossible, to fix in prose, of the utmost beauty, the passage of time itself. I have been on that journey with him, often having to admit my failings as a reader, yet I will get there, conquer this extraordinary narrative, which has given many more years than just a century.  

Photo © Bibliotheque nationale de France (BnF), Paris, France, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY

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