In one of the best-known passages he ever wrote, novelist Marcel Proust (1871–1922) described the torrent of memories evoked by a bite of cake. The taste of the pastry, a petite madeleine, instantly transports the adult narrator of In Search of Lost Time back to the happy days of his childhood, when he often ate the cakes with his aunt.
The rush of memories also causes the narrator to reflect on the ability of the smallest sensations—the whiff of a familiar scent, a bite of cake—to evoke the most powerful remembrances. “The smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls, ready to remind us, waiting and hoping for their moment, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unfaltering, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.”
The passage is famous for introducing one of the major themes of Proust’s masterpiece, the “vast structure of recollection” and the complex roles those memories play in human consciousness. It is also famous for arriving near the beginning of the seven-volume, 3,000-page narrative, which is about as far as many readers get in Proust’s sprawling, challenging, and massively influential work.
Proust, one of the most significant authors of twentieth-century world literature, was born in the Paris suburb of Auteuil and spent much of his youth in Illiers, a rural village. The fictional town of Combray, the setting for much of In Search of Lost Time, was a composite of his two childhood homes. He suffered frequent health problems as a child, but nonetheless served for a year in the French army.
Proust was frequently ill as an adult and spent the last years of his life as a virtual invalid. He normally worked at night and slept during the day and confined himself to a room lined with soundproof cork to allow him to concentrate on his writing.
Massive in scope and subject matter, In Search of Lost Time unfolds over several decades and encompasses the period of social and technological change in France between the Franco-Prussian War and World War I. The novel has hundreds of characters and revolves around the unnamed narrator, Proust’s alter ego. The book was one of the first to deal frankly with homosexuality (Proust was openly gay) and also touches on themes of aesthetics, music, and philosophy.
Finishing the book took a major toll on what remained of Proust’s health, and he died of pneumonia at age fifty-one. The last volumes were published posthumously, and the entire series was finally completed in 1927.
ADDITIONAL FACTS
- Proust was a fan of the English essayist John Ruskin (1819–1900) and translated two of his books into French.
- In Search of Lost Time is also frequently known as Remembrance of Things Past, an alternative translation of the original À la recherche du temps perdu. The book is more than 1,250,000 words.
