
However, for those who do not wish to start at the beginning, with Swann's Way, this is paradoxically the one volume with which it might be conceivable to start a non-chronological attempt, for it is here that the narrator, identified as "Marcel" (but not to be confused with Proust himself, or not entirely), encounters characters from earlier books, grown older and bearing the traces of the passage of time, and decides to turn the experiences of his life into fiction, into the book we are holding. Reissued as a tie-in to the film by Raoul Ruiz, this final volume of Proust's masterpiece In Search of Lost Time presents obvious problems for those coming to it without the benefit of having read the previous sections: even with the extensive character guides and synopses which make up the last third of the book (230 pages!) the task is a daunting one, with Proust's notoriously labyrinthine sentences equally likely to impede the unwary reader.
