Proust

Finally got round to reading some Proust. The volume, Du coté de chez Swann, had three parts of A la recherche du temps perdu: I Combray, II Un amour de Swann, and III Noms de pays: le nom.
Wonderful book! This guy writes as no-one else ever wrote. He really succeeds in penetrating the obsessive way one sometimes thinks about things. Kafka, and Conrad do this, too, but the subject of the thoughts is rather extraordinary in their cases. Proust is just dealing with the most ordinary thing in the world: love. By tracing and repeatedly retracing the same mental track, as one does when in love, but without ever exactly repeating himself, by following the same thought to two contradictory conclusions, and by really taking his time, and hundreds of pages, he touches the reality of the experience as I have never seen it done. His account is also attractive for its sensitivity to beauty in all its forms, and for the way in which he manages to maintain tension about the outcome of the underlying narrative.
The old-fashioned French and the vast vocabulary are an additional plus.