It evokes summer scenes painted by the impressionists and, indeed, Elstir is modelled in part on Monet. He meets the painter Elstir and a gang of sporty girls, with whom he falls collectively in love. The narrator, now a young man, is staying with his grandmother at the Grand Hotel. This volume takes place in the fashionable fictional seaside resort of Balbec. “In the shade of the girls in bloom” doesn’t sound quite the same – I think translator Scott Moncrieff did it better with Within a Budding Grove. The second volume has the most beautiful and really untranslatable title A l’Ombre des Jeunes Filles en Fleurs.

Combray, which gives its name to the first part of the first volume, is the kind of place you might never want to leave, so if you stop there, you’re still winning. The place and its people are so vivid unsurprisingly, since Combray is modelled on the little town of Illiers, not far from Chartres, where Proust’s father grew up and where Marcel did indeed spend holidays, staying with his aunt and uncle. Slowly the past uncurls its petals and Combray – the scene of all the family’s Easter holidays, with its walks, its river, its shops and its church – is restored to him. The book also includes an authoritative introduction and a comprehensive index of artists and paintings mentioned in the novel.The older narrator, who has forgotten everything about his childhood except the trauma of his mother failing to give him a goodnight kiss, dips a shell-shaped Madeleine in a cup of limeflower tea. With some 200 paintings beautifully reproduced in full color and texts drawn from the Moncrieff/Kilmartin/Enright translation, as well as concise commentaries on the evolving narrative, this book is an essential addition to the libraries of Proustians everywhere. Blattin becomes the subject of Proustian mischief by being described as “exactly the portrait of Savonarola by Fra Bartolomeo.” Eric Karpeles has identified and located the many paintings to which Proust makes reference and sets them alongside the relevant text from the novel in other cases, where only a painter’s name is mentioned to indicate a certain style or appearance, Karpeles has chosen a representative work to illustrate the impression that Proust sought to evoke. Bloch’s appearance as a boy is likened to the portrait of Mehmet II by Gentile Bellini Odette de Crécy strikes Swann by her resemblance to a figure in a Botticelli fresco.

Not only are there frequent references to specific works of art, but certain characters are also evoked by comparison to particular paintings. A la recherche du temps perdu by Marcel Proust is one of the most profoundly visual works in Western literature.

Proust books in order