Rating: 
Summary: Worthwhile, but be prepared...
Review: I set myself the challenge of reading this monumental work, and am still in the process of slogging through Volume 3, which I hope to finish sometime before death.The book has moments of transcendant beauty and insight that have made it worthwhile, but also some deeply tedious sections that seem to drag on endlessly. My main problem has been the exasperation I feel with Proust himself. It is frankly difficult at times for modern readers to identify with this supremely self-involved aesthete of the early 20th century. Often I just want to reach out and smack him and tell him to quit whining and obsessing and get on with his life, already. Currently, I am dealing with his jealousy and need to control Albertine and her lesbianism, when I have to restrain myself from screaming "Go ahead and break up with her, you dolt!" The minute details of his emotional life spread out over 3,000 plus pages are sometimes overwhelming. On the other hand, I have to admit that he is ruthlessly honest and makes no attempt to render himself in a glowing light, which is admirable. And there are occasionally those deeply profound insights into human nature that strike a chord in everyone, along with a valuable documentation of a time and a life so unlike my own and fascinating in its own way. Take the challenge, and good luck!
Rating: 
Summary: A String of Pearls fit for a Select Few
Review: It is a travesty that anyone could claim to find this masterpiece "boring." Proust's novel belongs in that select pantheon of books that truly deserved to be called Classics. A finer study of human nature (amongst other things) one will not find anywhere.
Rating: 
Summary: Impossible to translate.
Review: If you want to read "A la recherche..." learn French. Otherwise don't bother.
Rating:
Summary: The most beautiful novel ever written.
Review: Proust's prose is unmatched in its ability to express the richness of both inner and sensory experience. Furthermore, Remembrance of Things Past (better translated as In Search of Lost Time) is full of philosophical insights of which most professional philosophers can only be envious. Proust is fascinated by the phenomenon of involuntary memory: a smell, a taste can suddenly transport an individual to the past, to the person he or she was and is no longer. The simultaneity of experience (it is always a present sense that triggers the memory) and consciousness of experience (it remains, after all, a memory) shatters the illusion of integral identity. An individual dissolves in the waves of experience that traverse through time. The English translation does an excellent job of conveying the beauty of Proust's words.
Rating:
Summary: The language is more poetic than Shakespeare...
Review: Proust puts to shame any who would laim to be romantic authors in use of language. The lines come so smoothly and beautifully, there is never any question as to what Proust is trying to make the reader feel, see, hear, touch and taste. His life becomes your own when you read through this marvelous work of literature.
Rating:
Summary: A life-changing read
Review: 30 years ago in my 20's I read Proust, over the period of a year. It has influenced my whole life, particularly his portrayals of friendship changes over time. It gave me a way of looking at life different from my crisis-ridden, "it's all over" point of view. Proust's book is about almost everything, because it is about his whole life. At his worst a very neurotic parvenu, at his best a deeply compassionate writer. And funny! Proust is a writer who lets his frailties show along with his greatness: unlike Tolstoy or St. Exupery, whose writing shows all their wisdom and little of their frailities. Proust is especially knowledgeable about jealousy. It you are not interested in thorough examination of a feeling, in pages, you won't like this. Interesting theories of art, literature, music. If you want to know where I'm coming from,
Rating: 
Summary: worthwhile, yet, boring
Review: im glad i read swan's way at last.i tended to drift as i read many of the sentence's. the so-called insights may have been news to readers way back when,but not to me.it was comic and ribald in spots,but overall id say it was quite boring
Rating: 
Summary: Where to start...?
Review: How much happier one feels in the world, having waded through "In Search of Lost Time." How greatly enriched ones appreciation of the brevity and humor in the language of tax forms or hand-drier instructions; how swift and direct the dentist's drill; how breathlessly fast-paced the wait while a cop writes you up a speeding ticket. If boredom were heroin, this book by itself would sustain the most craven junkie blissfully to his death of old age. The core "project" of the book is to describe in excruciating, fine-comb, microscopic detail every single sensory impression, thought, feeling, memory, and fleeting bit of moronic philosophy (together with all the motivations behind these) in the life of its narrator. Of course, even if the subject had led an exciting, interesting life, this would still be a ridiculous idea. But when the subject's life essentially revolves around flowers and tiny cakes, the result is about two feet of bookshelf space that could be put to better use, say, storing cigarettes for distribution to children.
Rating:
Summary: Pssst! Have you heard what he wrote?!
Review: Good heavens, what will the neighbors say? And in what language--English? French? Kansan? I speak the first, he speaks the second, they speak the third, which makes I and they neighbors to him and he to us. So what will he say? What will he say that he hasn't already said and so very well that it's a scandal he chose to say it to us, who only have ears for each other. I suppose he was just being neighborly. If wheat fields like growing, it does (they do), if words feel like being said, they get said (he says them).--I thought we were talking about a book and, therefore, about written words, not spoken ones. Oh, Marcel, oh, moi, oh, vous, oh, neighbors,--I don't think we're in Kansas anymore. It smells like home when home was where the Art was and I was jut the book next door to the book next door to the book next door. I love libraries, and I don't care who knows it, who says it, who writes it. I do care who remembers it and how and why. Oh, pen, I don't think we're in need of ink anymore, but I can't stop gossiping.
Rating:
Summary: The most rewarding work I have ever read
Review: In response to the reader in Chicago (20 Jan 1999), I would recommend Terence Kilmartin's revision of the C. K. Scott Moncrieff translation, which I read in a three-volume Penguin edition and found very satisfactory. Since reading Proust, I constantly find myself having flashbacks to his work in all kinds of situations and I am forever meeting people who are parallelled in it. It is certainly impossible to go to a classical concert without finding at least one person nodding their befeathered head in ecstasy! At least read about Swann and his jealousy over Odette, or the moving section on his grandmother's death, and you will surely be hooked.
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