Towards the end of his life, his frail, indolent son Marcel, who had lived on his inheritance and had disappointed his family by never taking up a regular job, told his housekeeper Celeste: ‘If only I could do for humanity as much good with my books as my father did with his work.’ The important news is that he amply succeeded. His father, Adrien Proust, had been one of the great doctors of his age, responsible for wiping out cholera in France. Marcel Proust wanted his book to help us. It recounts his quest to stop wasting time and start to appreciate existence. The book tells the story of one man – a thinly disguised version of Proust himself – in his developing search for the meaning and purpose of life. It is a work that intersperses genius-level descriptions of people and places with a whole philosophy of life. What makes it so special is that it isn’t just a novel in the straight narrative sense. It was immediately recognised to be a masterpiece, ranked by many as the greatest novel of the century, or simply of all time. À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, 1919 The book was published in French in seven volumes over 14 years: Marcel Proust (seated), with Robert de Flers (left) and Lucien Daudet (right), ca. Marcel Proust was an early 20th-century French writer responsible for what is officially the longest novel in the world: À la recherche du temps perdu – which has 1,267,069 words in it double those in War and Peace.
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