Lately I’ve been reading Marcel Proust’s Rembrance of Things Past (aka. A la recherche du temps perdu, In Search of Lost Time), which I supposed would be quite an undertaking, but am actually finding quite readable. I get the impression, and had the impression myself, that Remembrance of Things Past, like The Odyssey, is another of those classic novels that scares people away because they think it’s too difficult to read. Admittedly the sentences are often quite long, as is commonly the style with Victorian novels, but I think the main reason people are put off reading the novel is its length: I thought Ulysses was long at over nine-hundred pages, but the complete Remembrance of Things Past is about three-thousand pages long (which is practically inconceivable to me, whose longest work currently stands at about 120 pages). Daunting, certainly, but not so much when you consider it is split into seven volumes.

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