Swann's Way as Graphic Novel. Can You Believe It?

Marcel Proust is one of those great writers not often read these days. Maybe Hemingway, Jack London, Fitzgerald and other American writers were more approachable because they also wrote short stories and novellas. Proust's massive two-volume Remembrance of Things Past is even more intimidating than Tolstoy's War & Peace or Melville's Moby Dick.

I will be the first to admit I have not read Proust. And yet some critics have called him the most influential writer of the 20th century. Graham Greene called him the greatest writer of the 20th century.

As it turns out, Proust did quite a bit of writing besides his major novel. If he'd been translated to English he may have become more accessible.

Now, Proust is being introduced to a new set of readers by means of the graphic novel. It seems unusual, but then again, no more so than R. Crumb's Illustrated Book of Genesis.

Here are the first few panels of Proust's book, followed by a handful of quotes that reflect his ideas and style.

We are not provided with wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can take for us, an effort which no one can spare us.

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We are healed of a suffering only by experiencing it to the full.

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Happiness is beneficial for the body but it is grief that develops the powers of the mind.

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If enough time was left to me to complete my work, my first concern would be to describe the people in it, even at the risk of making them seem colossal and unnatural creatures, as occupying a place far larger than the very limited one reserved for them in space, a place in fact almost infinitely extended, since they are in simultaneous contact, like giants immersed in the years, with such distant periods of their lives, between which so many days have taken up their place – in Time.

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