In September 2025, for the ninth time, I will begin leading a group of keen (and possibly trepidatious) readers through Marcel Proust’s extraordinary masterpiece In Search of Lost Time. Below I will explain why I believe reading Proust is a life-changing experience. If you are at all curious about joining please email us with any questions you may have.
For anyone keen to immerse themselves in the Paris of Proust and the Belle Époque (regardless of whether you have yet read Proust) we still have places available on our five-day travel study in September.
“Every reader, as he reads, is actually the reader of himself. The writer’s work is only a kind of optical instrument he provides the reader so he can discern what he might never have seen in himself without this book. The reader’s recognition in himself of what the book says is the proof of the book’s truth.”
Marcel Proust
Proust’s seven volume In Search of Lost Time is a daunting prospect for most readers. I think of reading Proust as a kind of practice. It took me many years of teaching around Proust to finally decide to dive in to teach the work itself. And honestly, my first reading through Proust in 2017 felt quite laboured. But by the second journey, I started to soar in the prose—in the mode that Proust uses that blends the lived experience of a boy growing to a young man whose sense of wonder, curiosity and hunger to know often meets with disappointment in a world that is more artificial and transactional then glittering and authentic. Perhaps surprisingly, it is a comedy, but the comedy is often at the expense of the naïve narrator. But what Proust does so brilliantly is to use his narrator’s lived experience—the disappointments, jealousies, awkwardness, memories and false starts to explore how the mind gathers impressions and perceptions—and through imagination, desire and memory to create a universe. And this is the material of the artist.
As we accompany the narrator on his journey, we enter a world in a profound state of flux, traversing the decadence of the Belle Époque, the social and political ructions caused by the Dreyfus Affair and the trauma of World War One.
What previous readers of Proust with the Salon have said:
“I believe that no author understands human nature and his characters’ psychology more profoundly than Proust. They are more alive than any other author’s. Proust isn’t afraid to show the mix of good and bad motives and traits that add up to a human personality in everyone.“
“For me personally, reading Proust has been such a deep, meaningful experience over a long period of time. I feel it has become an important part of me.
Could it be a revelatory reading experience? . . . a journey to be savoured – again . . . and . . . again?”
For more inspiration we suggest this article by Cath Pound on the BBC website: Why the world’s most difficult novel is so rewarding.
