FOLLOWING LOST TIME (1)

Over 70 years late, Proust's colossal work - the most important novel of French literature in the 20th century, and one of the few peaks of modern prose - is finally beginning to see the light of day in Hebrew. This work is both an open and a closed work of life, on the one hand its end is pre-planned, and on the other hand it is doomed to never be finished. And therefore - despite its tight totality, it can also be read part by part (as its first French readers read it, over 14 years). Frost's work - doubtless autobiography, doubtless an all-embracing novel-apprenticeship, flowing from the longing for what was lost to the "returned time" - is a work that cannot be summed up. It can be said that the whole is nothing more than an incredible expansion of only one sentence: the narrator becomes a writer. The end point is also the beginning: the one who wanted to be a writer but failed in his attempts, feels that he has the power to begin his life's work: the materials from which his life