JUDITH THURMAN from ‘I Never Took My Eyes off My Mother’

Was any writer ever sexually more inquisitive, disillusioned, or rapacious than this fragile aesthete with exquisite manners who entombs himself in a cork-lined room? The “Search” is a novel that seethes not only with carnality but with candor about it. I had forgotten how shameless its opening scenes are, and my shock was not one of prudery but of gratitude for the example of so much brazen freedom. Proust sets the tone – the bar of audacity – with Marcel’s first reverie. As he lies in bed, consoling himself under the covers, as the sleepless and pubescent do, a woman – Eve – is born “during my sleep from some misplacing of my thigh. Conceived from the pleasure I was on the point of consummating, she it was, I imagined, who offered me that pleasure. My body, conscious that its own warmth was penetrating hers, would strive to become one with her, and I would awake. The rest of humanity seemed very remote in comparison with this woman whose company I had left but a moment ago; my cheek was still warm from her kiss, my body ached beneath the weight of hers.” The identity of this delicious and pliant half-waking apparition will shortly be revealed, and it must be said that Marcel’s desire for the true subject of his dream is no chaster, no more dignified, no less intense or incontinent than his lust for her stand-in. As he yearns and schemes obsessively to possess her – picturing their two merged bodies alone in Eden – he reformulates Genesis (the “Overture” to the “Search” is Proust’s Genesis) so that the First Couple are not a man and a woman, but a mother and a son.

JEREMY EICHLER from ‘I Succumbed Once Again to the Music’

When I go to concerts, I often bring along a colleague or a friend, but my most frequent companion, the one who always arrives just as the lights have dimmed and the silence fallen, is Marcel Proust. Indeed, ever since I first read Proust, his musical sensibilities have joined me in the concert hall, for in addition to being the poet of love, of longing, of memory, and of loss, Proust is the poet of listening.

One need not share Proust’s radical sense of isolation to appreciate its antidote in music; powerful works can draw us blissfully away from ourselves and into another state of mind. Each music lover no doubt has his favorite routes of departure. My own include the solo violin and cello works by Bach, with their sense of somber nobility, and the late quartets of Beethoven, to which we could easily apply Proust’s phrase “the transposition of profundity into terms of sound.” And yet, the magic of this music is not only the journey out that it affords but also the journey in, the journey back. As Proust of all writers would appreciate, each of our most cherished pieces of music can over time become a diary into which we unconsciously inscribe a history of private moments, associations, and memories. Hearing the piece performed again can be an invitation to leaf back through its pages, and discover in its wash of sound the tokens of a past life that seem all the more precious because we never knew they had been saved.

SHIRLEY HAZZARD from ‘I Felt That This Last Sentence Was Merely Phrase-Making’

When I, at 16 and living in Hong Kong in the postwar years, was merely aware of the “Recherche,” with no idea of what was in store, I met, at a gathering, a handsome, reserved, and pleasant person, still young, who was introduced as Miss Scott Moncrieff. I already understood the name’s literary significance. It was at once explained, in her presence, that she was – the niece, was it, or cousin? – of the great translator. She was one of the few women to hold, then, a distinguished, and beneficent, position in the colony; and it occurred to me that she possibly wearied of her reflected glory. Later, the matter being discussed in her absence, I heard, for the first time: “Of course, the whole thing will have to be redone.”

Not so easy as all that.

J.D. MCLATCHY from ‘Each of Us Is Indeed Alone’

For all the several times I have read the novel, the once I listened to it was the most telling. Admittedly, it was in English and abridged to a mere 40 compact discs, but what it lacked in authenticity it made up for in narrative power. Read aloud to, one feels like the young, febrile Marcel tucked under the sheets, listening to the longest imaginable bedtime story. Experienced in this way, the novel’s subtleties fade before its story line. For all the sweep of its speculations, the buoyant eddies of intellectual retrieval and clarifying trope, one clings to he novel’s more basic melodramatic appeal. The story opens, after all, in a mood of suspense, and the neurotic child’s panic amid the little Oedipal struggle foretells so many later competitions for favor. Moments of crisis – confrontation, flight, revelation, heartache – finally rivet this novel together. And to my mind, the most stark and wrenching of these moments is the death of Marcel’s grandmother. Not only are we losing one of the book’s most beloved characters (in a book where, we are led to believe, nothing is ever lost), but the episode reminds us that of all the great themes animating In Search of Lost Time, death is paramount. Underlying memory and desire is death. We want to raise the dead or fill the heart’s voids, but must first acknowledge the emptiness, the ghost, before our eyes. What better description of death is there, after all, than lost time?