I‘M SURE MOST OF YOU are familiar with Marcel Proust’s brilliant and epic work, “Remembrance Of Things Past.” That is, I’m sure you’re as familiar with it as I am, which is to say you picked it as one of your free book-club selections 14 years ago, got a few pages in, found it less convivial than “The Cardinal Of The Kremlin,” and stuck it away next to the Civil War books we all bought after the Ken Burns special and never read either.
There are many books of the last hundred years that were huge and surprising hits, surprising in the sense that I don’t know how it’s possible for a regular person to plow through any of them without Christopher Hitchens right next to you the whole time. (Then again, I guess lots of things could be accomplished without the blessing of three hundred cable channels.) I’m thinking just now of Faulkner’s “Absalom, Absalom,” or anything James Joyce wrote after “Portrait Of The Artist,” to name a few.
