Is the 300-year search for one of Shakespeares actual books over?
Prousts capacious novel seems to have woven itself into my days and thoughts for more years than I like to remember. I first came across it when I was about 14 in wintry Montreal, where the days are short and the nights long. My parents didnt have many books, but a friends father had a library. One day, he said I could look round and choose. I dont know why my eyes stopped on the two thick volumes with creamy spines. I certainly didnt recognise the author, whom I imagined was pronounced Prowst. Maybe it was the title: Remembrance of Things Past (later renamed In Search of Lost Time). My mother was always remembering distant countries traversed somehow to arrive in Canada. But I suspect I was just greedy and the spines evocative list  Swanns Way, Within a Budding Grove and so on  suggested that there were a lot of novels here, all in one.