Rating: 
Summary: Huge but memorable, if you can get past the boring parts
Review: This book is over 3,000 pages. Some of it is boring, slow reading. Marcel, how about submitting this to an editor and whittling it down to size? We don't all have seven months to kill. But even with this serious complaint, I give this book 4 stars out of a possible 5. The characters are great. The protagonist (let's call him Marcel for argument's sake) is quite a character. His sweetheart Albertine is unforgettable. He loves her but is afraid to tell her so, fearing that if he reveals his vulnerability to her she will step all over him. But she already knows that he loves her, so he's completely off the mark. She fears that he will never forgive her for her sexual experiences, particularly for her bisexuality, and will never marry her. A marriage proposal from him would solve both of their problems and would end her days of sexual promiscuity, but Marcel blows it. When he is told that she's gone for good, in more ways than one, he is heartbroken. And yet, the funniest part of the book occurs years later when Marcel is vacationing in Europe and receives a letter bearing the signature of Albertine. By this time, Marcel is interested in another cute girl, so he tosses the Albertine letter in the garbage. After all those tears! Another hysterical and ridiculous character is Charlus, social lion and seducer - of young men. His reappearance later in the book as an old man getting tortured is pathetically funny. It reminds you of the old joke Ow! Don't! Stop! Don't stop! The recurrent theme of the book is that love is born of pain. We don't fall in love with someone until that person causes us pain or abandons us. Love is agony. Leave it to Marcel Proust to come up with that one.
Rating: 
Summary: Proust WILL change your life
Review: This is really a review of the first three volumes (how far I've gotten). Proust's intricate difficult prose makes you work - but it is so worth it. On one level, the books are full of insight into the nature of artistic and literary perception, memory and imagination. This is what I expected from Proust - and it is all provocative, mind expanding stuff. On another level, they are a touching, funny, sometimes sad account of childhood and adolescence, sexual awakening, the loss of a beloved grandmother, etc. etc. This was unexpected. Also unexpected was the heartbreaking meditation on love that is Swann's Way, and the delightful - almost Jane Austen-like or Dickensian - social comedy that is much of the 3rd volume. Many people are probably put off by the first 70 or so pages - the extended memory reverie that doesn't seem to be going anywhere. But if you keep going, the rewards - intellectual, emotional, and just plain fun are all there!
Rating:
Summary: A Masterpiece
Review: The greatest masterpiece of our century. Nobody will NEVER write anything similar. It's a celebration of senses, memory and life; it's misterious and sarcastic; it's amazingly beautiful and sometimes sadly cruel. It simply changed my life, nothing's the same since I read this book. Now the Duchess of Guermantes, Charlus, Odette, Swann and the others are a part of my life, just as my family or my friends. Thanks God, Proust was born and decided to become a writer.
Rating:
Summary: Ask a born- again Christian to review the bible?
Review: I cannot review this book. I can only review my self (I fall short) in the light of what it has taught me. (everything) How this po-faced humility would amuse him!
Rating:
Summary: The greatest novel ever written
Review: I've found that listening to Proust (by way of full-text cassette recordings of ISLT) is far more palatable and meaningful than trying to read his work. Even so, it takes frequent rewindings to catch the meaning of what appears to be a diversion. Try the book-on-tape version: it's worth it. Proust can indeed make you see life differently.
Rating:
Summary: Much like heaven, if only it could compare to his prose...
Review: "Swann's Way," like each book in the series, is pure bliss. "Oh rapture," I found myself whispering, entirely entranced from the first. His command of language and his description of the everyday are wonderful, giving life and breadth to childhood memories and form and substance to chamber music. Reigning blood, from a lacerated sky. Under his pen the novel comes alive, sundering you to absolute awe of his masterful prose. Montcrief's translation, also, is a triumph in its own, widely considered the finest in all of literature. Infamous, butcher, Angel of Death. Still, the work is so stunning I'm learning French just to read this friggin' masterpiece. Oh yeah, and I'm the greatest baseball player that ever lived!
Rating:
Summary: Only in French
Review: Take your time and learn french firs
Rating:
Summary: Grokkable
Review: Reading Marcel Proust books like : The Past Regained , has been a delicious experience . i especially like the sense in his novels of space and time as being deepened [in terms of their potential for a type of resonance ] by the act of contemplation : where things are contemplated according to a sequence of precise manuevers within and outside of the mind . This is a theme the theologian Paul Tillich also touches upon in his writings . Thomas Wolfe , perhaps , was mistaken when he said : you can't go home again . Marcel Proust teaches us that it is possible to go home again . If we are willing to dwell on the past and contemplate without conflating or distorting each of the distinct nuances of past experiences , we can have the experience of cosmically going home again . [We must in this process avoid the mental laziness of the pop psychology that tells us "don't dwell on it' , "don't cling" to the interesting experiences of the past . ] Do dwell on it should be the message .
Rating:
Summary: The best books I have ever read - by a huge margin
Review: Until I started "In Search of Lost Time", my favourite novels were Les Miserables, David Copperfield, Nostromo and Anna Karenina. I am now two-thirds of the way through ISLT, and believe it surpasses all of these and everything else I have ever read. Before I started I was worried it was a complete con - praised by arty intellectuals with their heads up their own a**es. It isn't. The book is wonderful because it captures all of life's subtleties and replays them in slow motion so that you can see and appreciate them, sometimes for the first time. As a result of trudging (and it is a trudge at times) through this: * I now appreciate beauty much more than I did before: I am a better observer and lover of the countryside, landscapes, sunsets, buildings, flowers; * I am a sharper observer of other people, with a shrewder understanding of human motivations and actions; * I am more tuned in to my own feelings, and believe I am a little wiser. The first 150 pages are slow, and I found the description of Combray tedious. At first the 15-line sentences are difficult (some I had to re-read five times), but I got used to them after a few hundred pages. The prose is often exquisite, sometimes very funny. I am so glad I persevered through it, and have already made up my mind to read it again, though perhaps in ten years time.
Rating:
Summary: Novel to be felt
Review: I just would like to say that this is not a novel to be read through at once, in order to trace its plot or logic. Instead, this novel is to be felt and visualized. I am sure that you will be amazed by Proust's rare ability to describe intangible things (smell, tastes, music, etc). If you really would like to get absorbed in his world, make some tea, get madeleine, and listen to Gabriel Faure's chamber music.
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