Why do people gush over Proust? I'd rather visit a demented relative

Germaine Greer in the guardian.co.uk, Sunday 8 November 2009

If you haven't read Proust, don't worry. This lacuna in your cultural development you do not need to fill. On the other hand, if you have read all of A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, you should be very worried about yourself. As Proust very well knew, reading his work for as long as it takes is temps perdu, time wasted, time that would be better spent visiting a demented relative, meditating, walking the dog or learning ancient Greek.

In Search of Lost Time, or Remembrance of Things Past, as Proust's "novel" is variously titled in English, is widely touted as one of the favourite books of the 20th century, second only to The Lord of the Rings. Fans of Tolkien can certainly handle a marathon read, as can Harry Potter addicts; but whether they have stayed the distance with Proust seems to me highly doubtful.
ALRDTP is not so much a book as an armful of books. No bookshop can be relied upon to have all the volumes in stock at any one time. The cost of the whole work is likely to be prohibitive – unless you can read it in French, in the one-volume paperback edition of the text established by the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade over five years from 1987. This is a helluva read, being 2,408 pages, 1.25m words, and so heavy that you can't read it in bed let alone in the bath (if you can read it at all, with its crowded, narrow typeface and tiny margins).

This cannot be called the definitive text because, when Proust died in 1922, the last three volumes existed only in typescript, festooned with pasted-in interpolations and additions that Proust's literary executors tried to make sense of; they moved some, ignored others, all the while erasing repetitions and inconsistencies in the belief that Proust would have done as much if he had had the time. Recent editors have restored this momentarily inert mass once more to chaos. Ulysses, too, is an editor's nightmare, and ALRDTP should not be damned solely on that account. But it is damnable in its fake heterosexual voyeurism, and its disparaging and dishonest account of homosexuality.
Greer's full story here.