I remember reading somewhere that one of the realisations that marks the passing of youth is that you'll never get around to reading In Search of Lost Time. I'm 32, and while some run marathons and others buy sports cars - my smoker's lungs and writer's bank balance preclude both of those pursuits - I've chosen to cling to the wilted remains of my salad days by tackling what Harold Bloom calls "the major novel of the 20th Century", what Cambridge don Christopher Prendergast asserts is "a vast exercise in imaginative retrospection, on a scale not seen in European literature since Wordsworth's Prelude", and what the New Yorker's Alexander Woollcott said was "like bathing in someone else's dirty water". I'm eager but nervous, and I'm asking for your help.
Nothing, it seems, is easy when it comes to Proust. His life's work is typically known, alongside Ulysses, as the novel that's started most and finished least (presumably because so few even try to open Finnegans Wake), although Teletext's recent poll gave Vernon God Little that dubious honour. Not only have I never read In Search of Lost Time, neither has anyone I know. In fact, given that if I complete it I'll probably never stop banging on about it, ever, I'm tempted to say that I haven't even been within boasting distance of someone who has.
Maybe I'm overly self-conscious, but even buying the bloody thing was awkward. True, I did sneak Alain de Botton's How Proust Can Change Your Life into the pile (for feelgood succour in the trying moments I anticipate along the way), thus appearing like a bluffer who buys books chiefly for the kudos emitted by their hurriedly broken spines. The bookseller was kind enough to let the transaction pass unremarked, but in a turnaround that took even me by surprise her discretion suddenly wasn't enough. "I'm embarking on Proust," I wanted to shout. "Shouldn't you ring a bell or shower me with tearful kisses or something?"
Still, despite the fact that when looking at that forbidding stack of books glowering at me from beside the couch I experience something of what an Apollo astronaut must have felt when the hatch was shut and the countdown begun, I do realise that In Search of Lost Time is, at bottom, only a novel. A six-volume novel comprising 3,276 pages and weighing in at 2.52 kilos, yes, but a novel nonetheless.
Which brings me to the help I mentioned earlier. I've lacked David's luck when trying to polish off a fair few literary Goliaths: I've been defeated by Ulysses, and Tristram Shandy, and Don Quixote, as well as numerous others I'll spare myself from confessing to; so I'd appreciate any advice at all that you're able to give. If you've read Proust, or started to read him, or have read nary a sentence and just want to pitch in (à la Pierre Bayard), please, feel free.
And if anyone with a long-harboured urge to wrestle the little French supposed genius to the ground (shouldn't be too hard seeing as how he didn't get out of bed for the better part of 15 years) should care to join, I'm going to start on Lydia Davis's 2002 Penguin translation of The Way By Swann's in the next couple of days and I'd appreciate the company.
I plan to check in at the end of each volume to let you know how it's going, but if a prolonged silence ensues then head on over to eBay to nab yourself a near-mint set (some water damage; possible impact marks) of one man's classic and another's bathwater.
