I’d heard of In Search of Lost Time before mostly in passing, usually mentioned with a mix of awe and dread by literature students and professors. I knew it was long, famously long, and I knew it had something to do with memory and a madeleine. But I didn’t really understand what reading it would involve until I was assigned it at university.
At over 1.3 million words, Marcel Proust’s seven-volume novel is listed in the Guinness World Records as the longest book ever written. And reading it? It was a challenge. The prose is dense, the sentences often spiral for pages, and at times I wondered if I’d ever make it to the end but the experience of reading it ended up somewhat shifting the way I think about time, memory, and even how we process the moments that shape us.
At first, reading Proust felt like losing time ironically fitting, considering the title. I found myself frustrated, often re-reading sentences or entire pages just to grasp what was happening. There’s no fast-paced plot, no traditional structure but that’s the point.
In Search of Lost Time is less about events and is more about perception, memory, and how we internalise life as it unfolds and as we reflect on it later.
In our world of instant messages, fast content, and constant distraction, the act of giving myself over to this massive, meditative novel felt almost radical.
It reminded me of several years ago when you’d look up words in a dictionary one by one to grasp a sentence that had new words in it during a time when the internet had only just emerged and Ai was not in the picture.
One of Proust’s central themes is involuntary memory, the idea that memories can be triggered unexpectedly by a sensory experience. The most famous example is the taste of a madeleine dipped in tea, which unleashes childhood memories in the narrator.
Proust’s genius lies in capturing this process on the page. He shows how these flashes of memory can be more powerful and emotionally true than anything we recall on purpose.
Reading those passages made me more aware of how often this happens in daily life, how a scent, a song, or even a quality of light can suddenly take you back to a forgotten moment, things we don’t necessarily realise but live through frequently.
Many people are put off by Proust’s style and so was I, with its endless sentences, and the way he lingers on details that seem, at first, trivial but this form isn’t accidental. The novel’s form follows its function.
The structure is part of its message, that time is subjective, not linear, and neither are our thoughts. The stream of consciousness allows the reader to experience time as fluid, much like our inner lives, emotions and thoughts.
While it’s difficult to summarise a novel so vast, In Search of Lost Time is ultimately reflects about what it means to live and to remember having lived.
Through the eyes of Marcel, we watch as the author narrator grows, falls in love, observes society, struggles with loss, and finally becomes a writer. The work is deeply introspective, using personal experience to explore universal truths.
Proust uses literature as a way of preserving life. Through writing, he captures not just events but the feeling of time passing and the ways we try to hold onto it.
Reading it helped me understand how much of our lives we don’t fully process in the moment. Proust also shows that while time inevitably moves forward, it doesn’t necessarily move away from us. Our memories live on not always by choice and the people, places, and experiences we’ve known can resurface when we least expect it. That sudden reminder, that involuntary memory, is at the core of what makes us human.
This isn’t a book I’d recommend lightly. It’s not a page-turner, and it demands more from the reader than most novels ever will. But if you give yourself over to it, even partially, it has the power to shift your thinking not just about literature and art, but about your own life.
Through the act of writing, Proust transcends time leaving behind something that, though written more than a century ago, still feels strikingly relevant today.