... brief but haunting.

... charmingly ramshackle.

Friedländer reads In Search of Lost Time very much against the grain, alert not only to the pleasures of its prose and its psychological acuities and metaphysical masteries, but even more so to its many contradictions and moral ambiguities.

Pulitzer-winning Holocaust historian Friedländer (The Years of Extermination) meditates on the 'extraordinary pull' and hidden depths of Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu in this intriguing extended essay.

Early on, Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Friedländer writes that he believes In Search of Lost Time is not only the greatest novel of French literature, but one of the most important novels ever written. In this brief, thought-provoking examination that is likely to appeal most to literary scholars he focuses on the 'Narrator’s strange, contradictory statements' and how the Narrator functions as Proust’s 'alter ego.'.