Proust can spear a microsecond out of the stream of time, disembowel it, explode it outward, and pin the grotesque autopsy to a Rococo velvet cushion. Time is enchanted in his world both by him and by forces outside of him. Moments at the theater are curtained by naiads, nymphs, and sea goddesses in the theater of his mind. The divide between himself and the world he inhabits becomes more clear in the third installment. Moments seem to be viewed through a telescope even while we know that he is in the same room as the players on the moment's stage. There is a beautiful disaffected detachment that causes poetry to ooze out of the page at the expense of the validity of the book's narrator. A bargain that seems impossible for a good author to pass up.

How can we take a man at his word in this universe? A constellation of lying scoundrels are all given time to soliloquize and flaunt their well-referenced idiocy here. But what about the man at the center of it all? The universe of the Parisienne salon is orchestrated by a black hole at its center who can have no shape other than Proust himself.

Loss creeps in to punctuate the solitude in this volume. It leaves behind empty spaces in Marcel just like it does in us all. We're treated to the hints of this loss's emotional toll only by oblique slips that the narrator allows into his memoir in the form of passing comments from the people around him.

Names take on even more sacred meaning for a man who is living his life in melancholy retrospect. Proust says at one point, "Our feelings belong to one world, our ability to name things and our thoughts belong to another; we can establish a concordance between the two, but not bridge the gap."

The book reads like a half-interested man poised in view of his own near-sociopathic detachment and struggling to find enough beauty to bring his internal feeling of self in sync with the world that he inhabits. Perhaps it makes me a bore to be so enthralled that a man can take the utterly banal and force it to bloom. Marcel Proust affirms that the grand parts of life can take place between the interstices of the margins and will never prevent you from zooming into their art further.