Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time is enormous. About 3,200 pages in most English translations. The book is acclaimed as “the world’s longest novel” by Guinness World Records, its authors lauding its “9,609,000 characters”. (“Each letter counts as one character. Spaces are also counted.”) If the serious reader is liable to fret that the accolade is a doubtful one — the literary equivalent of “world’s fattest man” — the frisson of a challenge is not easy to ignore either.
To the New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik, In Search of Lost Time is “Mount Proust”. The ascent is the final test of bookish endurance. “9,609,000 characters? Bring it on.” Or so I muttered to myself in the dying days of 2022, contemplating with a mountaineer’s appraising squint the sky-blue and yellow livery of my elegant 12-volume (12!) secondhand edition. One does not casually pick up Proust. One makes a vow, a commitment, a resolution. Proust was my New Year’s resolution.
