Marcel Proust is generally considered the greatest French novelist of the twentieth century. His reputation, which derives almost exclusively from the importance of his multivolume novel Remembrance of Things Past (also translated as In Search of Lost Time) is that of a dazzling stylist, analytical thinker, and social observer. His novel is founded on his powers of meticulous recollection and his ability to shape those memories into a compelling--some might even say exhausting--account of one man's search for his past. This search leads the narrator, and reader, into a world of charm and deceit, virtue and perversion. E. M. Forster, in his Abinger Harvest, called Proust's novel "an epic of curiosity and despair," while Edmund Wilson wrote in Axel's Castle that Remembrance of Things Past was "one of the gloomiest books ever written." But André Maurois, in his biography Proust: Portrait of a Genius, reconciled Proust's seemingly...