‘Impossible to make head or tale of it!’ commented Jacques Normand (Madeleine was a fortuitous pseudonym), one of Proust's first critics, in the reader's report that led to the rejection of an early version of Swann's Way by the publishing house Fasquelle in 1912. Despite serious misgivings, Normand concluded his report remarking that ‘it is impossible not to see here an extraordinary intellectual phenomenon’. And this phenomenon has attracted a staggering volume of critical responses (many more positive than Normand's) ever since. In 1992, Antoine Compagnon, in his informative overview of Proust's work and its fate through the years in France and abroad, published in Pierre Nora's Les Lieux de mémoire [Realms of Memory], estimated there to be ‘certainly more than two thousand’ books on Proust and his work. Recent bibliographical data show that over 1,200 further books, articles and essays on Proust and his work were published between 2004 and 2008. The ever-growing secondary literature on Proust dwarfs the works on Montaigne, Balzac or Sartre. So where does a beginner begin?

Getting started

There are several useful reference works we can lean on while reading Proust's novel. Terence Kilmartin's A Guide to Proust (1983), now published together with Time Regained in the Vintage edition of the novel, offers indexes of fictional characters; historical persons; places; and, usefully, themes, all with brief descriptions and fully cross-referenced. This makes tracking down particular passages easier and reminds flagging memories of relations and connections that may have grown fuzzy over time.