Having just gotten my B.A. a couple of years ago I must have been in an ambitious mood or something, because I decided to read the whole of In Search of Lost Time, cover to cover, pausing only for food and sleep. It's the sort of work that looks more like Mount Everest than a regular ol' novel when you first start reading it, but it turned out to be one of the best companions I could have asked for over the past few years. Proust was a mmaster of the cooly detatched but almost unbelievably sensitive description of human motivation, and his perspective on the harmless, but decadent latter-day French aristocracy whose attitudes and practices provie most of the material for the seven books in the series, is deeply selfish and amoral, but also inexhaustibly curious and sympathetic. This constrast comes out most noticeably in The Captive and The Fugitive, which basically consist of several hundred pages of reflection upon Proust's love affair with a young girl named Albertine. The pair of novels are full of long, sustained reflections on the nature of love, and upon the deep mysteries that attend upon trying to understand what makes other people tick. There is an especially lovely passage in which Proust describes the feelings he undergoes while watching Albertine sleep. By the time of the end of the novel, though, the reader finds himself left with the curious sense that one doesn't actually know anything at all concrete about the "Fugitive" Albertine. Nobody was better than Proust at dissecting the motives and the mores of other people without ever gining in to the novelist's illusion that he understood them better than they did themselves. I recommend these novels to anyone who is up for a bit of a challenge (even Scott Moncrieff's lovely translation of the French could never make Proust an "easy read"), and who is prepared to be enlightened by the reading of a novel even if it doesn't issue in the usual "payoff" of a sense of superior understanding in relation to the charatcters depicted there.