Ebook: Mirages and Mad Beliefs: Proust the Skeptic

Marcel Proust was long the object of a cult in which the main point of reading his great novel 'In Search of Lost Time' was to find, with its narrator, a redemptive epiphany in a pastry and a cup of lime-blossom tea. We now live in less confident times, in ways that place great strain on the assumptions and beliefs that made those earlier readings possible. This has led to a new manner of reading Proust, against the grain. This work argues the case differently, with the grain, on the basis that Proust himself was prey to self-doubt and found numerous, if indirect, ways of letting us know.