No time for tomes like these | Letters

Daunted by Proust or Joyce? Letters from Ian Arnott, Mike Bromberg and Andrew Keeley on giving up on a long read

Dave Patten says Proust’s In Search of Lost Time was unreadable (Letters 22 May). When I was a student of French in the 1970s I attempted to read it in French, but gave up after volume one. The only person I knew who had read it all in the original French was one of our lecturers who told us he had done it to pass the time one long summer vacation when he was laid up with gout. À chacun son gout, I suppose.
Ian Arnott
Peterborough

• I got no further than the first volume of In Search of Lost Time. It is surely no coincidence that the widely quoted incident with the madeleines occurs in that volume. Does anything of note happen later?
Mike Bromberg
Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire