I’m just starting The Guermantes Way, the long slow march through Proust – long, slow, luxurious, I should say – is taking the better part of a decade. I do roughly one book per year, except that Guermantes will be both 2003 and 2004. Some nights I read only a few sentences, less than a page, yet it feels as though I’ve read a lot, each sentence is such a construction. Construction’s not the right word for it, tho, for coiled about syntax as every sentence is, it feels more organic, even more organicist, than it does built. Even in the English of the Moncrieff / Kilmartin / Enright translation. Proust is one of the very few authors – in English the closest I can imagine are Faulkner & Kerouac – for whom reading a single sentence can feel like a significant reading experience.

This edition translates À la recherche du temps perdu as In Search of Lost Time, but I’ve been so conditioned over the years to think of it as Remembrance of Things Past that I still do. And know that I always shall.