It follows from here that Proust should be read slowly, 20 or so pages at a time. It is also more or less the only feeling most people associate with the author who, they would be astonished to learn, wrote equally well about love, family, religion, art, music, politics, fashion, the beauty of the natural world, anti-Semitism, and the weather. To begin at the beginning, the Combray overture at the outset of the first volume, Swann's Way, ("For a long time I used to go to bed early") is the most pleasant description of sleepiness ever written. If I had to guess, I would say that in the vast majority of cases the same handful of things prevent the average reader who is otherwise inclined to sit down with Proust from getting on. (The latter has also taken much longer to write than Remembrance.) Both of these have sold many millions of copies. At a few thousand pages and around 1,250,000 words, Proust is only slightly longer than Harry Potter, which has been read by millions of children, and A Song of Ice and Fire, a novel cycle about hobbits who have sex, stands unfinished at more than 5,000 pages. It cannot be a simple question of length. Why this is the case is not entirely clear. Proust is widely recog-nized as an icon of French literature and culture, but ultimately his mysterious rep-resentations of this place and its culture call into question the existence of a single Francophone literature or a single French identity.Remembrance of Things Past (as I prefer to think of it) is probably the least read of all "Great Books," with the obvious exception of Finnegans Wake, which is neither great nor a book. Second, Balbec is populated by Jewish residents. First, the town's name refers to the ancient city of Baalbek, located in what is now Lebanon. Proust's suggestion of Middle Eastern influences further distorts the idea of a singular French experience. For instance, when recalling his travels through the fictional French town of Balbec, he states, "These strangely ordinary and disdainfully familiar cathedrals cruelly stunned my unconsidered eyes and stabbed my homesick heart." Words such as "stun" and "stab" suggest the hostility the narrator feels from this French territory. As a result, the narrator becomes a stranger to, or is estranged from, his homeland, and lives the life of an exile. In his work, French cities are archaic and exotic. Proust describes France in ways that one would not expect. According to BenhaYm, memory functions within this text to re-configure both. More recently, scholars such as Andre BenhaYm have explored the relationship between Proust's treatment of memory and his representation of France and French culture. For Proust, involuntary memories are superior because they contain the spirit of the past in a way that voluntary memo-ries do not the former are more vivid, and they have the power to erase the temporal distance between the present moment and past experiences. Involuntary memory occurs through the stimulation of the senses, while voluntary memory is a deliberate effort to remember the past. For instance, Harold Bloom states that it is "widely recognized as the major novel of the twentieth century." In addition to not-ing its length-it spans seven volumes and 3,200 pages-many commentaries have focused on Proust's treatment of two kinds of memory, involuntary and voluntary. Many scholars consider Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past (1913-1927) a significant literary achievement.
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