The Best Marcel Proust Books

We’re here to discuss the seven volumes that together make up Marcel Proust’s masterpiece, In Search of Lost Time. Why should we still be reading Marcel Proust’s books now?

Many topical issues that come up in Proust’s novel are unfortunately alive and well, either still or again.

Proust is famous for his long sentences, and the longest of the long sentences, which covers a full three pages, is about the plight of gay men in early 20th century Europe—including Oscar Wilde, who had recently been sent to jail. There is also concern about rising anti-Semitism—the novel depicts the era of the Dreyfus Affair—and World War I: you get a fair amount of discussion of the various forms of foolishness that got us into a catastrophic war.

It would be nice to think that our politicians today are less foolish, but there are definitely times today where you think, jeez, we’re sleepwalking into something bad.

More generally, it’s a novel in which you often witness the triumph of the mediocre and the scheming, the worthless, the conniving. So there’s a bunch of stuff that might feel strangely reminiscent.

But, actually, those aren’t the main reasons to read Marcel Proust today. I think the reason to read the novel in 2025 has pretty much stayed the same since it was written, which is that it raises big, enduring questions about human existence. It also trains our brains.

I think people can be quite intimidated by Proust. In your Very Short Introduction, you note that you too found him difficult on first reading.

Yes. You’re right that people can be intimidated—that includes a poor chap who was one of the first to review the manuscript for publication, who said:

After the seven hundred and twelve manuscript pages, after infinite amounts of misery at being drowned in a sea of inscrutable developments and infinite amounts of maddening impatience at never returning to the surface—one has no notion, none, of what it’s all about. What is the point of all this? What does all this mean? Where is all this going?—Impossible to know anything about it! Impossible to say anything about it!

It’s true that the first time I encountered Proust I had the same feeling. I was really lost.

But over the years, my feelings have changed dramatically. One thing I often recommend to people who are interested in dipping their toe in is to jump to the end of the first volume. Obviously the beginning is very important, and includes amazing things—the famous madeleine scene is about fifty or sixty pages in, for example, depending on the edition—but, nonetheless, there’s a section at the end of the first volume which is really lovely. It’s a fairly linear story about young love and the naivety of youth. It’s charming and sweet and wistful, and much more welcoming than the actual beginning of the novel, where you aren’t sure what’s going on and things jump around in time.

I mean, the first line of the novel is:

 For a long time, I used to go to bed early.

It takes a while to figure out what that’s supposed to mean. I had a conversation with my dad about this. (He read Proust long before I did.) For years he thought that meant that was when the narrator was a child. But, if you were a kid, why bother saying you went to bed early? Of course you did, you were a child. You figure out much later on that he’s talking about some time in middle age, when this character is—Well, anyway, the point is, it’s confusing.

I had to read it as an undergraduate at Cambridge. There, the system is that you have two weeks to read a text, gulp down some criticism, write an essay, then have a tutorial. After a week, I got to page 72 and realised I had forgotten everything I’d read, so I started again. At the end of the second week I had made it back to page 72. It was the only time I had to miss a tutorial. I thought they were going to kick me out; luckily that did not happen.

But then, years later, I happened to be spending time with a friend. She had a commonplace book where she wrote down quotes from the books she was reading. A couple of those quotes were from Proust, and these were two of the greatest passages I had ever read in world literature. So I thought, okay, yes, maybe there is something to this Proust chap.

Later still, I happened to take a class where we read some selected passages from late in the novel—very different from the stuff you get in the first volume. I had the feeling of: Where have you been all my life? This is exactly the stuff I need to be reading and thinking about. So I ended up reading the novel in a very weird order. I read 72 pages from the first volume, a bit of the fifth volume, the rest of the fifth volume, then the sixth and seventh, then I went back and read volumes one to four.

I don’t know if I recommend doing it that way, but that’s the story of how I fell in love with Proust.

That’s great. As you have yourself written, it is notoriously hard to boil this 3,000-page novel down to a synopsis. That’s why Monty Python’s sketch about the ‘All-England Summarize Proust Competition’ is so hilarious. I guess we are going to give it a go.

To satisfy the ‘five books’ remit, I suggest that we look at volumes one, two, five, six, and seven. I hope readers will forgive me for this, because some people are big fans of volumes three and four. And I think there is some great stuff in volumes three and four. But there are also a lot of dinner party scenes.

There are definitely two kinds of Proust fan. There’s the fan of the big dinner party scene, and the fan of the more philosophical side of the novel, which has to do with selfhood and memory and love and art. I’m in the latter camp. For me, the beginning and end of this 3,000-page novel are where most of that can be found.

That reminds me of something I’ve heard of Tolstoy readers: that they divide into ‘War’ fans and ‘Peace’ fans.

That’s great; I hadn’t heard that.

But shall we begin? Firstly, can I ask directly about variations in titles: early translations of In Search of Lost Time were entitled Remembrance of Things Past. Why?

‘In Search of Lost Time’ is the more accurate translation. The initial translators—it ended up being a kind of relay team—were interested in porting over some Shakespearean echoes. Actually, I really like that translation, which is now Vintage’s Modern Library translation. It’s not identical to the original, but it’s pretty close.

Penguin’s translation of the first volume’s title is ‘The Way by Swann’s,’ which is more accurate, but it sounds strange. ‘Swann’s Way’ sounds a little more idiomatic. But you win some, you lose some. ‘In Search of Lost Time’ is pretty good as a literal translation.

Then let’s start our discussion with Swann’s Way, the first volume of this massive novel. As you mentioned, this is the book that features the very famous madeleine dipped in tea. What else can we look forward to?

Lots of different things. It’s a book in multiple parts. The first section focuses mostly on a particular episode from the narrator’s childhood, when he was around seven, going to bed and hoping that his mother would come up and kiss him good night. He’s a rather anxious child, and continues to be anxious into adulthood. Then there’s the famous madeleine scene that ends the first part. Then a fairly long section: a description of life in a small country town, where this character spent his summers. In this section there’s an incredible little scene involving three steeples seen from a moving carriage, which is surprisingly important.

Then you find an entirely different thing: you flash back twenty years or so—the chronology is a little unclear—to a time before the narrator was born. We get the story of a couple, Charles Swann and Odette de Crécy. They fall in love, or at least, he falls in love with her. So you get the story of that love affair, which includes some lovely stuff about music, then that section ends and you reach a fourth section, the one I mentioned earlier, which is the lovely, lyrical, charming little story of a romance that the narrator has when he is a young man.

Overall, what you get in the first volume is a sense of this character gradually coming into focus; it’s part of the reason why that reviewer was so mystified. We start with the character waking from sleep. He’s bleary. It’s a lovely scene. Whatever he’s been reading about he has sort of become in his dream, and so when he wakes up, he is not sure if he’s a musical quartet, a church, or even the rivalry between Charles V and François I, which is delightful. Then:

I had only the most rudimentary sense of existence, such as may lurk and flicker in the depths of an animal’s consciousness; I was more destitute of human qualities than the cave-dweller; but then the memory, not yet of the place in which I was, but of various other places where I had lived, and might now very possibly be, would come like a rope let down from heaven to draw me up out of the abyss of not-being, from which I could never have escaped by myself.

So his memory rescues him from a feeling of not being anything.

Later you get the madeleine scene, which adds another really important component of who he is—what Proust calls the “true self,” this enduring component of personality. Then the steeples passage fills that in a bit more.

So over the course of Swann’s Way, this character goes from being almost nothing, barely human—he’s a quartet, a cathedral, a rivalry—to being more or less fully fleshed out as an individual.

Right. I suppose I can see why early readers were quite mystified. Because, am I right in thinking that, this great masterpiece sort of materialised out of nowhere? It’s not like Proust was already a well-established author.

That’s right. He’d written this and that. He’d published some short stories and translations. But no one could have possibly predicted that the writer of those pieces would ever produce this masterpiece. There had been nothing like it before, and there’s not really been anything like it since.

Malcolm Bowie has a lovely line in a review of a biography of Proust—because there are many biographies of Proust, often very long—

That a life like that should have produced a novel like this is the miracle of miracles

You couldn’t predict this novel on the basis of that life, which was a fairly ordinary life of a rather anxious person who was, you know, already writing—but not like this. One or two of those earlier pieces are really great, but nothing in the same ballpark.

Let’s turn to the second volume of Marcel Proust’s book In Search of Lost Time. I’ve often seen it titled ‘Within a Budding Grove.’

Penguin, again, tries to capture the original French more literally. In that edition I think it is called something like ‘In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower.’ Which is more accurate, but doesn’t trip off the tongue. Again, I like the less accurate title here.

And, actually, that’s a little theme in Proust. When do you want the truth? Oftentimes you do, and you’re frustrated when you can’t get it. But there are times when a bit of benevolent, harmless self-deception can be preferable.

This leads us to the second volume, where the narrator of this first-person novel makes a little trip to a seaside town called Balbec in a train. Proust’s narrator loves train travel. Later on, he drives a little bit in a car and he notices that car travel gives you more accuracy but less enchantment. And at the end of the day, in a situation that is not like—you know—a medical diagnosis, where you really need the truth, why not go for the enchantment? The train almost magically takes you somewhere else.

In those days, train travel seemed almost impossibly rapid. I mean, it was already maybe 100 years old, but nonetheless it could whisk you from one place to another place, and you had the feeling of the world being divided into magically unique and distinct zones. Go to sleep in Paris, wake up in Florence. As though you were in a different world. What you don’t want to do is make that same schlep in the car, where you notice all the gradations.

So, that’s a recurring theme in Proust, that occasionally the truth isn’t what you want.

What’s the overall feeling in this second volume?

It continues the flavour of the end of the first volume. For the most part, it is light and bright.

I think of the whole novel as having a ski jump shape over the 3,000 pages. You start off reasonably high, go down and down and down with increasing rapidity and terror, until suddenly you have lift-off and soar majestically into the sky.

So, here, we are still at a decent elevation. In the second volume, there is travel, excursions within Balbec, you’re meeting a lot of people—some a bit weird, some friends for life—and the character’s grandmother is there. She is all kindness, with a huge heart.

We also meet a new love interest, who turns out to have a mole on her chin, except no, it’s actually on her cheek, except no, it’s actually on her lip. It’s a really interesting move by the narrator, to trick us that way.

Lots happens in this volume, but maybe the biggest thing is a visit to an artist’s studio. Now, I’m saying this not as a ‘war’ guy, or a ‘peace’ guy, but an aesthetics guy. There are three prominent artists in the novel—a painter, Elstir; a composer, Vinteuil; and a novelist, Bergotte. Here we have the character looking at some paintings by Elstir and having deep thoughts about what art is capable of doing.

You’ve alluded to art, or the experience of art, as being a great preoccupation of Proust. Is that how you would describe the whole sequence—as a study of art and its effects?

Yes and no. It’s so many things. It’s a novel about selfhood, what it means to be ‘you.’ (What happens if you change across time?) It’s a novel that thinks about time and memory. It’s a novel that thinks about same-sex love. It’s a novel that thinks about love more broadly—sometimes the character calls it a ‘disease.’ Is love a disease? Does it always have to involve jealousy?

So, it’s a book about a lot of things, but yes, art is one of the biggest questions it raises. What can art do for us? That’s an enormously important question the novel keeps thinking about, and it’s connected to a question about enchantment—whether a world without God can be re-enchanted.

This is not a character that believes in God, but he really seems to be looking for something like God. He wants the world to be mysterious again. He wants the world to have wonder. He wants epiphanies, a new kind of infinity, new forms of depth and order.

Beautiful. Thank you. The third book, or rather the third volume of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, is The Guermantes Way. You suggested it was rather taken up with high society.

Yes, that’s right. So if you are more of a fan of the social portrait side of Proust, then you are going to like this volume. It’s a kind of Balzac side of Proust, and he does it very well. He does everything very well. But I’m not that kind of person.

There are a couple of things in there that I like a lot. There’s a segment about art, where the narrator—on one of his visits to high society—makes a special pilgrimage to a painting. It’s a beautiful scene. And there are some brilliantly savage depictions of the aristocracy. In one, an aristocratic couple are waiting for a carriage to take them to a party. They talk to an old, close friend, and ask him if they will see him at such-and-such event. He says: probably not, I’ll be dead by then. He’s been told by his doctors he doesn’t have long to live. And instead of staying to console their friend of many years, they go to the party. They tell him: I’m sure that’s not true, you’ll outlive us all! And that licenses them to go on.

So there are some wonderful things in there, and in the fourth volume—Sodom and Gomorrah—as well. The title is obviously an allusion to the biblical story, which is often taken to be a punishment for same-sex love. The fourth volume is heavily taken up with same-sex love in Parisian society. And it’s brilliantly done. (The part I’m less excited about, again, involves the endless dinner party conversations and salon events.)

If you’re tempted to skim volumes three and four, I highly recommend spending time with the first part of volume four. It’s very short, maybe 30 pages, and it’s a fantastic scene of two men finding each other in a kind of miraculous way. And I won’t say more than that, because it’s so great and I don’t want to spoil it.

Proust was himself gay, is that right? But the narrator of In Search of Lost Time is straight and often quite oblivious to homosexual undercurrents.

Yes, exactly. Proust himself, as a person in the world, was gay, and when he was drawing these portraits of the world of same-sex love in Parisian society, he knew what he was talking about. But, yes, he created a character who isn’t gay and is completely mystified. It’s almost funny, right? He’s so obtuse, and not only obtuse but sometimes bigoted.

But he goes back and forth. He has moments of thinking, maybe same-sex desire is fine, and no different to any other kind of desire—which, by the way, doesn’t necessarily mean great, because he thinks of all love as a disease, so he thinks people are going to suffer regardless of whether they like people of the other or the same sex. He even has moments of thinking that same-sex love is something wonderful. However, he has moments of castigating it as a “vice.” So it’s an interesting move on Proust’s part to create a character who, unlike himself, is straight, and as you say, so straight sometimes as to be homophobic. This is the character through whom we are getting this depiction of a world of same-sex love.

Still, there are interesting moments, especially in this first part of volume four, which is about the community of gay men and lesbian women who—unlike the communities that this character spends most of him time in, these stifling, aristocratic salons full of petty rivalries and vanity—form connections based on something genuine and important. This is a complicated world, complicated not just by external persecution but by internalised prejudice, sometimes, as well. But it’s a world where people meet and bond over something that is really part of who they are.

Could Proust live openly as a gay man in France at that time?

It was very dangerous to be open, and Proust himself was not ‘out.’ I mean, even Oscar Wilde was not ‘out,’ exactly, but his preferences were sufficiently known about that he got into trouble with the authorities. Proust knew about stories like that; it was a very bad time for gay men at the turn of the 20th century.

In his biography of Proust, Edmund White described Proust as “closeted,” even though “everyone near him knew he was gay.” So, in short, there was a concern to preserve confidentiality at a broader level.

Same-sex love also features in the next volume of Marcel Proust’s seven-book masterpiece In Search of Lost Time. This is The Prisoner, also translated as The Captive.

Okay, so now we’re lower down on the ski jump. Things are getting a little bleak. It’s very claustrophobic: most of the novel is two characters in one room. It’s really the story of a love affair gone awry, a love affair that has degenerated into pathological jealousy.

The main character is worried not only that his girlfriend is cheating on him, but that she’s cheating on him with women. The reason this is so upsetting to him is that he just can’t get his head around it. He can imagine a situation where she’s cheating with another man; he knows what that’s like. But he can’t imagine his way into a situation in which there are two women together, and for him that is doubly painful because he has no control, either literal or metaphorical. He can’t wrap his mind around it, and—partly because he is the jealous type, and not best-equipped to sustain a long-term love relationship, and partly because he has probably made a poor choice of partner—he ends up in this pathological situation.

The reason this volume of the novel is called ‘The Captive’ is that he tries to control the movements of his partner to the extent that he can. She’s not literally a captive, but he puts pretty strong pressure on her not to go here or there. He has all kinds of spies; he sends her out with a driver, because he knows he can ask the driver later what she did and who she saw. So it’s a rather bleak volume involving a lot of jealousy, but it does have one extraordinary scene that suddenly catapults us into aesthetic bliss.

That might bring us to the penultimate volume, The Fugitive.

Yes. The Fugitive is the shortest of the volumes, and definitely the bleakest. So we’re really getting into the depths, here. This section of the book involves a break-up, a bereavement, and a slow, incremental, intermittent recovery.

One thing that this does is bring certain questions about identity into sharp relief. There’s a really nice line where the character says:

My life appeared to me … as something utterly devoid of the support of an individual, identical and permanent self.

That crystallises all the things you would want, if you want a sense of identity. You want to feel like you’re individual—that you’re not just a cog in the machine. You want to be identical—not fractured into antithetical drives. And you want to be permanent, not a radically different being to who you were a year ago, or even yesterday.

But this character feels like he has been smashed into smithereens, right? The experience of the break-up and bereavement—he’s lost a sense of wholeness across time. He’s lost a sense of distinction from the crowd. He also lacks the ability to know much about himself. All these things become real problems. These have been problems before, but this is the moment of maximal concern about how he can go on, and who he can be.

After this epiphany, or, shall we say, surge of awareness, we revisit the idea of involuntary memories in the final volume Finding Time Again, sometimes translated as Time Regained.

Yes. So, we already encountered involuntary memory in the first volume, with the madeleine episode—in which a character eats a madeleine dipped into a cup of tea, which he used to have pretty much every Sunday in the summer with his aunt Léonie. But he hasn’t had it in years, maybe decades, and because he hasn’t had it in so long it acts as a powerful trigger for memories. It’s as though he becomes again the child that he was at that time, and remembers all kinds of things he had forgotten, and he says the experience made him feel immortal, but that he wasn’t to know for many years why.

Now, in the final volume, some 3000 or so pages later, we learn why. So you have to be very patient, and you have to have a good memory. That’s one of the things the novel does—it encourages us to flex our memory muscles. So it’s not just a novel about memory, but a novel that cultivates memory.

Time Regained starts out by continuing in the bleakness of the sixth volume; the main character even spends time in a sanatorium. He’s really not doing well. Then comes World War One, and we see Paris in wartime. About halfway through, we get a series of epiphanies, a series of involuntary memories in which the character understands finally why that experience made him feel immortal. This turns out to be the answer to all the questions that he had, all at once.

That’s rather wonderful. Can we feel Marcel Proust, the man, at the heart of this book? Do you think it grew out of a similar epiphany in his own life?

That’s a great question. So, he was writing about involuntary memories before this. There’s an abandoned manuscript that people refer to as Jean Santeuil, named after the main character of that manuscript. Some people think it was going to be its own novel. Others think we should think of those pages as drafts for what ended up being In Search of Lost Time.

Either way, he’s writing about involuntary memories, but they don’t play the same role that they do in In Search of Lost Time. So a lot of people think that even though Proust did very likely experience involuntary memories—and, hey, many of us do—what happened to his character is not what happened to him. It’s not that he had an epiphany one day while eating a madeleine, but rather it was something he was interested in, and he realised it could form the structure of a novel.

Yes, I can see how this mental time-jumping can be very handy for a novelist interested in memory, in fractured identity over time, and so on.  What did his writing process look like? Did he begin at the beginning and write to the end, or did he work across the whole book over a long period.

By 1911 he had a draft of the whole beginning and the whole end, so the first 100-ish pages and the last 100-ish pages. Then he wrote the middle.

Interesting.

That’s actually fairly emblematic of the way he worked. He would drive his typesetters mad, because he would send handwritten pages in, and they would type them and send them back to him for corrections. Very standard process. But instead of correcting the typos, he added more stuff. You can find his manuscript pages online. They are almost inadvertent artworks; he adds so much that the writing starts spiralling out into the margins, beautifully. But, yes, this drove the typesetters mad. He was constantly adding stuff in the middle.

And so the thing grew enormously over the course of the 13-or-so years he was writing. But he had a sense, right from the beginning, of what the overall architecture was going to look like, including that promise: it made him feel immortal, but he didn’t yet know why. Then, at the other end of the book, this series of epiphanies and the understanding of why involuntary memory is so important, what it shows us about who we are, how it solves these problems—or at least some of these problems—to do with identity.

There’s even, in the manuscript, a sort of second scene, in which there is an objection to the serene confidence that this character has achieved during these epiphanies while he is sitting in the library of an aristocratic house waiting to be admitted. When he does get admitted to this social event, he sees a lot of people he hasn’t seen in a very long time. This is the Bal des Têtes, something like a masked ball. Essentially these people are almost unrecognisable, so this scene functions as a kind of objection to his sense that the most important part of us is atemporal, exists outside of time. Time turns people into these almost unrecognisable versions of themselves. What do we do with that?

He had this structure very, very early on. He had the opening of the novel—the episode about forgetting the madeleines, the promise that this is really important—and the explanation of why it is important, this beautiful and moving meditation on the atemporal aspect of who we are, and then the objection, and ultimately a solution to the objection.

That was all in place by 1911, then a bunch of stuff was added, the war happened, and because the war happened and you couldn’t print things, Proust had a whole bunch of time on his hands. That’s when the novel just grew and grew in his own mind. So the novel changed, but it also stayed the same.

Is there anything else you’d like add?

Something I’ve thought a lot about is why this thing had to be a novel. When Proust was starting to think about it in 1908, he wrote to a couple of people saying, I’m working on something, but I don’t know if it’s going to be an essay or a story. He himself was trying to figure out what it was he was writing.

He was obviously very interested in philosophical questions: What is love? Is it good for us or bad for us? Why do we fall in love with the people we fall in love with? Who am I really? Is there a connection between the social self and the self of the writer? Can the world be re-enchanted?

All of these are great questions, and you could write it as a philosophy book, but he didn’t. Instead, he wrote a 3000-page novel. We don’t have strong indications from his letters as to all the reasons he was doing that, but I think we get a lot of hints in the way in which he talks about art, and in how his character talks about art.

In some of his essays, he seems to suggest that art can do things that other forms of communication cannot. One thing that art can do is serve as a kind of Rorschach test, or mirror. It can allow the reader to see themselves in a way you won’t if you are reading a textbook, say, about biology. A novel can raise difficult questions, and also tempt you to make certain interpretive mistakes.

Proust said in a letter to a critic that he makes his character say something at the end of the first volume that he completely disagreed with, was the opposite of what he believed: “too bad for me if the reader believes that I take them for truth.” So he’s pulling all these tricks in the novel, which is the opposite of what you do in a philosophy book, but which allows the reader to find themselves and to ask themselves questions.

You may disagree with the character about whether love is a disease. I hope you do! But that’s part of the operation of the novel, to get you thinking about this. It’s also, I think a training ground for some of our capacities. As I was saying earlier, it really gives a workout to our memory muscles. And I think the unreliability gives a workout to our caution muscles—our probabilistic thinking muscles—which I think is very helpful to us in 2025, so we don’t always immediately give full credence to something that we hear.

So that’s a lot of things that this novel is doing, right? Acting as a formal model, acting as a training ground, acting as a Rorschach test.

I’ll say one more quick thing.

Please do.

There’s a lovely essay by Hervé G. Picherit, a former student of mine: ‘The Impossibly Many Loves of Charles Swann.’ It talks about that section of the first volume, ‘Swann in Love,’ where Swann falls for Odette. And what Hervé notices is that Swann falls in love with Odette ‘for the first time’ nine times. Now, depending on how you count, maybe you can get that down to five times, but you definitely cannot get it down to one first time.

Weirdly, Swann keeps falling in love for the first time with the same person, and for different reasons. Sometimes it’s because there’s a piece of music that opens up a space in his heart, or because she reminds him of a painting, or because she makes a nice cup of tea—which, as a Brit, I can understand. But most crucially, some of these reasons conflict with each other. He falls in love with her on one occasion because he’s confident she will fall in love with him. Then, on another occasion, because he’s worried that she doesn’t really like him.

What Hervé concludes from this, very nicely, is that it is making space for the reader: you’re being offered five, six, seven, eight, nine different accounts of why someone falls in love with someone else. I often do this survey with my students: Why did Swann fall in love? And it’s very rare that people notice there were multiple and conflicting reasons given; people gravitate towards one or other of them. And that will show you something about yourself, either something you believe or something you are worried about or thinking about, something like that.

These are some of the reasons, I think, why Proust ultimately decided he wasn’t going to write a philosophy book like the philosophers he admired. He was going to write a novel like the artists he admired, like the composers he admired, like the painters he admired. He then produces an object that works on us in multiple ways at once.

It asks these really interesting philosophical questions. It gets us thinking about things, but also it gives us better mental habits. Because you’re going to be spending—well, I spent seven years reading this. Maybe ten pages a day? The fastest I’ve heard of someone reading the whole book was three months. That’s still a chunk of time. But more likely it will be one or two years, or in my case, seven.

That feels very Proustian: by the time you get to the end of the book, you’re a different person to the person you were when you began.

Exactly. It’s like spending time with a friend, and that friendship changes your life.