In Search of Lost Time

Marcel Proust's seven-volume masterwork, published between 1913 and 1927, is the longest novel in the French literary canon at approximately 1.5 million words. Beginning with the narrator's famous involuntary memory triggered by a madeleine dipped in tea, it constructs an entire world from the architecture of consciousness and memory. T.S. Eliot considered it the greatest fiction of the 20th century. Modern neuroscientists cite Proust's description of memory as uncannily consistent with how the brain actually works.