As the Monty Python team discovered in a famous comedy sketch, Proust's In Search of Lost Time is not an easy novel to summarize. Proust worked on it for more than a decade and it was published in seven volumes (three of them appearing posthumously). It is an epic tapestry of French society, particularly its upper echelons, told in the first person by a narrator named Marcel. Through Marcel's eyes, and across several decades, we see the lives of a group of rich socialites as they conduct their love affairs and friendships, gossip bitchily at parties, go to concerts and art exhibitions, react to the major events of the day (from the Dreyfus Affair to the First World War) and sense uneasily that their day is done and that their wealth and social position are on the wane. Marcel himself is an exquisitely sensitive narrator, acutely and ironically aware of the absurdity of much of the behavior he observes so subtly, and open at all times to an appreciation of the transient beauty of both people and art. He is also preternaturally aware of the power of memory to shape our lives and to return us unexpectedly to the past. Famously, the novel begins with a long section in which the taste of a madeleine biscuit dipped in tea sends him back into his childhood and releases a stream of unconscious images from a world he has lost. In Search of Lost Time is a long, leisurely book (each volume is the size of an ordinary novel) and Proust's sentences often stretch languorously across the pages. Some people find his style irritating and the book unreadable. For others, In Search of Lost Time, as it slowly unfolds and moves backwards and forwards in time, is the greatest novel of the 20th century.

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