In Search of Lost Time is considered, by many scholars and critics, to be the definitive modern novel.[12] It has had a profound effect on subsequent writers, such as the British authors who were members of the Bloomsbury Group.[13] Virginia Woolf wrote in 1922: "Oh if I could write like that!"[14] Edith Wharton wrote that "Every reader enamoured of the art must brood in amazement over the way in which Proust maintains the balance between these two manners—the broad and the minute. His endowment as a novelist—his range of presentation combined with mastery of his instruments—has probably never been surpassed."[15] During Proust's lifetime, on the other hand, while he would achieve success, he would also face criticism from critics of his work. According to Cambridge University Press," Proust's reception during his lifetime is always set against the backdrop of often-hostile criticism, frequently based on the myth of the sickly, reclusive snob writing from the safety of his cork-lined room."[16]
Harold Bloom wrote that In Search of Lost Time is now "widely recognized as the major novel of the twentieth century".[17] Vladimir Nabokov, in a 1965 interview, named the greatest prose works of the 20th century as, in order, "Joyce's Ulysses, Kafka's Transformation [usually called The Metamorphosis], Bely's Petersburg, and the first half of Proust's fairy tale In Search of Lost Time".[18] J. Peder Zane's book The Top Ten: Writers Pick Their Favorite Books, collates 125 "top 10 greatest books of all time" lists by prominent living writers; In Search of Lost Time is placed eighth.[19] In the 1960s, Swedish literary critic Bengt Holmqvist described the novel as "at once the last great classic of French epic prose tradition and the towering precursor of the 'nouveau roman'", indicating the vogue of new, experimental French prose but also, by extension, other post-war attempts to fuse different planes of location, temporality and fragmented consciousness within the same novel.[20] Michael Dirda wrote that "To its admirers, it remains one of those rare encyclopedic summas, like Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, the essays of Montaigne or Dante's Commedia, that offer insight into our unruly passions and solace for life's miseries."[21] Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael Chabon has called it his favorite book.[22]
Proust's influence (in parody) is seen in Evelyn Waugh's A Handful of Dust (1934), in which Chapter 1 is entitled "Du Côté de Chez Beaver" and Chapter 6 "Du Côté de Chez Tod".[23] Waugh did not like Proust: in letters to Nancy Mitford in 1948, he wrote, "I am reading Proust for the first time ... and am surprised to find him a mental defective" and later, "I still think [Proust] insane ... the structure must be sane & that is raving."[24] Another hostile critic is Kazuo Ishiguro, who said in an interview: "To be absolutely honest, apart from the opening volume of Proust, I find him crushingly dull."[25]
Since the publication in 1992 of a revised English translation by The Modern Library, based on a new definitive French edition (1987–89), interest in Proust's novel in the English-speaking world has increased. Two substantial new biographies have appeared in English, by Edmund White and William C. Carter, and at least two books about the experience of reading Proust have appeared, Alain de Botton's How Proust Can Change Your Life and Phyllis Rose's The Year of Reading Proust. The Proust Society of America, founded in 1997, has three chapters: at The New York Mercantile Library,[26] the Mechanic's Institute Library in San Francisco,[27] and the Boston Athenæum Library. Furthermore, in 2016, The Proust Society of Greenwich, a non-profit organization was created to accommodate reading and discussing Proust to readers all over the world through monthly online sessions.
