The first response to À la recherche du temps perdu as a graphic novel is an involuntary memory of Monty Python and “the All-England Summarise Proust Competition”. The second memory, summoned mysteriously into life by this extraordinary book, is of the academic attending a musical version of Ulysses in Anthony Burgess’s Earthly Powers who says: “I have to explain why it can’t be done.”
But it can. Here is the narrator, visibly begging for a goodnight kiss from his mother, and here he is in visible ecstasies over the visible hawthorns of Combray – and at this point, the images break out of the standard grid formation of the comic book in the manner of Marvel’s Dr Strange series.
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