Proust: The Search by Benjamin Taylor review – scintillating narrative

In Search of Lost Time, also known to British readers as Remembrance of Things Past, is a million-and-a-half-word masterpiece, ostensibly about French life from the early years of the Third Republic to the aftermath of the first world war. To its fans, however, it is unique in world literature, and represents the apotheosis of the novel, a sublime and life-changing experience.

Marcel Proust was 51 when he died, but his short life and his voluminous roman-fleuve have attracted at least three massive biographies and a mountain of critical exegesis. Hats off, then, to Benjamin Taylor who, in fewer than 200 pages, has summoned up the spirit of Proust, conjuring the lost world of belle époque France with elegant, sometimes brilliant, brevity. For anyone who has gazed in wonder at the dizzying monument of Proust’s Search and retreated from its grandeur with a sense of deep personal inadequacy, or perhaps a secret hankering for Monty Python’s “All-England Summarise Proust Competition”, Taylor’s scintillating narrative is the perfect introduction to an intimidating prospect.

Taylor’s Proust is the story of a Jewish Catholic, a homosexual and a social butterfly exploring his true self in the seedy world of fin-de-siècle Paris. Proust was a late developer who, at the age of 37, found his subject and surrendered to it. Few writers in history have married life and art so obsessively, to the point at which Proust completely sacrificed himself to the Search. He would die with the huge manuscript stacked on the mantelpiece of his bedroom, in Jean Cocteau’s words like a watch ticking on the wrist of a dead soldier.

Taylor’s persuasive contention is that Proust, a dilettante inheritor, was a talented young writer who morphed into a genius through the tragicomedies of his social climbing and his awkward sexual adventures. He describes, vividly, how Proust also battled with disdain, rejection and unscrupulous publishers before the book that began as Les intermittences du coeur became À la recherche du temps perdu, and won the Goncourt prize.

Taylor’s other theme, arresting in such a short book, is the importance to Proust’s work of the Dreyfus affair, which rumbled away in the background throughout these years. The interplay of public and private life became essential to the making of the Search, but in the end, living on chilled beer and ice-cream, creatively immured in his cork-lined room, venturing forth only after dark, Proust becomes the supreme French writer of legend, writing and rewriting against the clock as if in the midst of an emergency. Deeply researched, and immensely well considered, Benjamin Taylor’s own search is an outstanding addition to Proust studies.

Proust: The Search is published by Yale University Press (£16.99). Click here to buy it from the Guardian bookshop