Time Regained

⭐⭐ for the entire work; ie, the seven volumes.

I've written about In Search of Lost Time before (book #1, book #2, book #3, book #5), so I won't elaborate here. Some of those volumes I liked (#5 and #6) while others I found quite boring (#3 and this last one, #7).

It has been quite a journey of five and a half years for me, and one that I'm glad I made. I don't think I'll ever read another ~4,000 page-long novel with so many highs and lows, so many characters, and sentences so long and convoluted. OK, Proust: you're a genius. I'll give you that. Not sure if you could have made a better investment of your talent and the last years of your comfy life, though. And I'm uneasy about your moral compass and your values, to be honest (yes, I know it's fiction and that was not your life — wink, wink).

But you nailed time, memory, and the experience of a life. I felt as if I had grown very old myself while reading the second half of the last volume. Everyone around me had grown old too — or died. The first episodes of the life of Marcel, those summer nights in Combray, I recall now almost as a personal memento. I guess that point could not be made in a shorter novel.

Was it worth it? I don't know yet; it'll take time to find out (no pun intended). But millions of readers and thousands of critics in the last hundred years think so.