Nonetheless, the colossus of the Recherche is widely considered one of the greatest novels of the 20th century, shoulder-to-shoulder with Joyce's Ulysses, and many readers consider it the greatest novel ever written, period. Proust sacrificed the last seventeen years of his life as well as the last vestiges of his fragile health to the composition of this book, and still never managed to finish it. At the risk of making a gross reduction, it is fair to say that Proust really wrote just one book: A la recherche du temps perdu, a sprawling, gorgeous, baffling, unforgettable novel about childhood and adolescence, travel and high society, sensation and sexuality, sleep and dreams, memory and forgetting, jealousy and art, comprising some 1.3 million words published between 19.
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