Book of a Lifetime: In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust

From The Independent archive: Lisa Appignanesi on being swept away by one of the 20th century’s great works of fiction

The Frenchman was a great writer on the psychology of everyday life (Getty)

Proust’s capacious novel seems to have woven itself into my days and thoughts for more years than I like to remember.

I first came across it when I was about 14 in wintry Montreal, where the days are short and the nights long. My parents didn’t have many books, but a friend’s father had a library. One day, he said I could look round and choose. I don’t know why my eyes stopped on the two thick volumes with creamy spines. I certainly didn’t recognise the author, whom I imagined was pronounced “Prowst”. Maybe it was the title: Remembrance of Things Past (later renamed In Search of Lost Time). My mother was always remembering distant countries traversed somehow to arrive in Canada. But I suspect I was just greedy and the spine’s evocative list – Swann’s Way, Within a Budding Grove and so on – suggested that there were a lot of novels here, all in one.

When I started reading, I was swept away. The fact now surprises me. I loved reading, but I was wonderfully ignorant, knew nothing of homosexuality or even sexuality, and hadn’t yet reached the age of university pretension. I would read anything and everything: Little Women side by side with Jane Eyre; the latest doctor and nurse romance; a comic or cereal packet.

So I read this man called Prowst, and something must have clicked. I think it was the form of perception, the attention to tiny, previously unattended-to details. I, too, often went to bed early with a book and thought I’d never fall asleep, only to wake a little later to find I had, and the characters in the book had become me while I had become them. I, too, sometimes had to remind myself on waking who or where I was, by making myself up from the things around me.

I read on. I liked this little boy, waiting for his mother to come and say goodnight. I spent a long time waiting for my hard-working parents to come home, too. I didn’t like waiting.

I no longer know what I made of Swann and his love affair with an utterly unsuitable woman, or of those lists of train schedules and place names. I think life must have intervened when the Duchess of Guermantes arrived in full bodily splendour. But I went back to read some more at university and ended up with Proust as part of my PhD. Rereading what I wrote about his constructions of the feminine in what became my first book is excruciating. But In Search of Lost Time gets better and better. I suspect that it was through Proust that I came to Freud, another great writer on the psychology of everyday life, our inner and social foibles, our madnesses and anxieties, and the complexity of the human mind.

Writing on love now, I go back to Proust time and again. It’s easy to dip. And you always come away with the sense that you’ve had a bracing swim in an ever-shifting sea.