During the war in Bosnia, I worked my way through the seven volumes of Marcel Proust's "In Search of Lost Time." The novel, populated with 400 characters, was not an escape from the war. The specter of death and the expiring world of La Belle Époque haunts Proust's work. He wrote it as he was dying; in fact, Proust was making corrections to the manuscript the night before his death in his hermetically sealed, cork-lined bedroom in Paris.
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