Proust regained: on Proust’s 'A la recherche du temps perdu'

Running into The Economist's paywall, recoiling to the archives.

Daniel Mark Epstein at The New Criterion, October 2000.

"Most well-educated people have not finished A la recherche for the same reason that most well-traveled people have not visited Antarctica: it is a long and expensive journey of uncertain value. Reports are unreliable. Whom do we trust to advise us to go or stay home? No one who has really been there wants to think he has wasted his time. So he will lavish upon the remote continent the most extravagant praises, sure that no one at the party will protest, calling Proust the Rembrandt, the Beethoven, the Einstein of prose fiction, praises befitting the effort of the journey. Those who have given it up in mid-career, like Aldous Huxley, returning with tales of disappointment and disgust, are even less to be trusted. They have not been there."

See Proust, Swann in Love, from Remembrance of Things Past, translated by C. K. Scott Moncrief and Terence Kilmartin, in Great Books of the Western World (second edition, 60 Vol., 1990) volume 59.