For years now, my ‘holiday reading’ has comprised one book — Marcel Proust’s masterpiece, In Search of Lost Time – and I see it staring at me as I write this in a London apartment. In between, the book changed its name, perhaps to trick me into reading it. When I bought my first copy it was known more poetically as Remembrances of Things Past.
It is a most widely travelled unread book, having accompanied me on holidays and reporting assignments for nearly a quarter century now. As Groucho Marx said in another context, it is a wonderful book, and someday I intend to read it. But clearly it is putdownable. In fact I no longer see it as a book, but as a travel companion, something that gets into and out of the suitcase before anything else. Others travel with family pictures, I have my Proust.
I have read commentaries on the book, other people’s battles with it, the philosophical implications of sitting in a cork-lined room and writing, and even a book that describes how Proust beat the scientists to the discovery of the manner in which memory fails. Yet the book itself sits on my shelf, mocking, challenging, provoking, tempting, like an ageing spinster who is on the verge of giving up hope but is putting in an effort all the same.
