Marcel proust in search of lost time
Proust.
Marcel proust in search of lost time
Why the world's most difficult novel is so rewarding
Marcel Proust's groundbreaking 1922 masterpiece In Search of Lost Time is considered daunting and difficult by many, but has been misunderstood and is actually universally appealing, writes Cath Pound.
This year marks the centenary of both the death of Marcel Proust and the publication in English of the first volume of his masterpiece In Search of Lost Time.
Widely considered by scholars and critics to be one of the greatest modernist novels of all time, it won the contemporary admiration of Virginia Woolf. "Oh, if I could write like that!" she exclaimed in a letter to Roger Fry in 1922.
Like Woolf and James Joyce, who would publish their own groundbreaking novels that year, Jacob's Room and Ulysses respectively, Proust spectacularly broke with the realist and plot-driven conventions of 19th-Century literature in order to create something entirely new.
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