There wasn’t much plot or action in the novels of Marcel Proust. Swann’s Way would never make a good Hollywood thriller and yet the random encounters that trigger memories in Remembrance of Things Past are cinematic. Steve Bachmann proselytizes for the author in the cartoon-illustrated Proust for Beginners, a useful handbook situating Proust in history and explicating his merits. Bachmann finds in Proust’s minute reflections on life in each moment “an ability to discover and articulate new conceptions of human reality.” He concedes that many great minds disagree, quoting Samuel Beckett’s description of Proust’s prose as “a maudlin false teeth gobble-gobble discharge from a colic-afflicted belly.”
