On the 25th of December, 2024, I finished reading Marcel Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time.”
I started reading this masterpiece in the middle of August 2023. It means I took one year and almost five months to complete reading Marcel Proust’s novel. What are my initial thoughts after finishing reading? I have two primary ones. The first is that to cherish and understand the whole masterpiece better, I would have to read it for the second time. The second thing is that I doubt whether I would read “In Search of Lost Time” for the second time. I had many times thought that I wanted to return to some of Dostoyevsky’s novels (I read almost all of them in 2013). Still, I cannot imagine getting through Proust’s novel for the second time. This is not the case; I did not enjoy contemplating Proust’s book.
On the contrary, I was reading it with a childish curiosity.
Still, I think I simply expected something more from it. For me, reading “In A Search of Lost Time” was something like traveling to the Moon – a mission impossible for most humans. Still, I knew it was only a book and that I could handle it. I was right. I read and finished, but I was a little bit disappointed. Perhaps the main reason is my age. The older I become, the fewer things that can astonish and surprise me, I think.
After all, in March 2025, I will be forty years old.
I read almost all of Dostoyvesky’s novels while I was twenty-eight years old. Perhaps my relatively young age and the fact I did not expect anything special from the Russian writer made reading Dostoyvsky so enjoyable. It was something like discovering other dimensions. Unfortunately, I did have the same “WOW” effect while reading Proust. Still, it does not mean I regret it. On the contrary, I believe each human should try to get through this masterpiece and contemplate time with the French genius. However, I found the novel’s excessive length and the author’s verbose style to be somewhat off-putting, which may have contributed to my disappointment. Speaking shortly, there was no “Eureka” effect.
