A useful reader's companion

This review was originally posted on Bookwyrm https://books.theunseen.city/user/4thace/review/79649/s/review-of-paintings-in-proust-on-goodreads#anchor-79649

Marcel Proust's work is known to many by the way it opens with a description of sense memory from his childhood, one of taste. But in his books the references to visual and auditory senses far outnumber these, whether he's describing a vista, a scrap of melody, the appearance of a character, or hundreds of references to works of visual art. Readers are unlikely to recognize all of these, or be expected to look up the precise detail that caught the author's attention, so this work pairing passages from In Search of Lost Time with reproduction of artwork mentioned is a powerful aid to the curious reader. Not every significant passage in the original is represented, so it isn't something that can substitute for reading the series, but to have it as one goes along would I think enhance the pleasure of the reader quite a lot. Most of these citations I did not recall from the time I read through the whole of Proust nearly ten years ago, but the passages brought a strong sense of the events in the story particularly in the way they affected the Narrator character. I enjoyed flipping through these 206 illustrations as a way to understand Proust's many sources of inspiration writing constructing his journey from innocence to near-madness finally to a kind of luminous transcendence.<br/>