But the good news is that Time can be defeated. It can be defeated through the chance operation of involuntary memory, such as dipping a piece of madeleine cake into a cup of tea. It can also be defeated through art.

The tension and swing of power between lovers and the inevitable disappointment when we achieve the object of our desires is a constant theme throughout the book. All the love affairs, homosexual as well as heterosexual, describe the futility of trying to possess or even understand another person. Love is a metaphor for all human experience and, fo

Above all, the book is extremely funny. Proust’s humor, veering between the subtle and the outrageously bawdy, affects every page of the novel. In Search of Lost Time is a comic masterpiece.

The rest of the novel traces the chronology of Marcel’s life over the next fifty years and the lives of his family, friends, and social acquaintances. The novel concludes at a grand party in Paris attended by Marcel and most of the remaining characters.

All of these references are used to express and illustrate startlingly original insights into every aspect of the human condition, from love and sex to religion and death—and all with a freshness and a comic sense of the absurd.

Unlike “Combray” and “Swann in Love,” which are both self-contained novels, “Place Names: The Name” is a transitional chapter of about fifty pages, serving to place the previous two works in perspective and to prepare the reader for the following volume.

The first forty pages of the novel describe the narrator as a young boy in bed awaiting, and as a middle-aged man remembering, his mother’s good-night kiss.

It is at the Parisian party that concludes the novel that Marcel finally realizes past feelings and experiences, far from being lost, remain eternally present in the unconscious. Marcel further realizes that these “memories” can be released through a work of art, and thus he discovers his vocation: to write In Search of Lost Time.

Transience and Time are the real subjects of the novel,