The one thing everybody knows about about Remembrance of Things Past is that it is absurdly long. To admit to reading Proust is to be pitied - 'how many pages?' - and secretly considered a little odd. Perhaps as a result of this I kept asking myself while reading it: why so long? Couldn't Proust have told the same story with a shorter novel? Seventeen pages to describe rolling over in bed (a statistic bound to impress your complete insanity onto your friends) is surely excessive? Some people, more used to 'doing' a novel in a week, find that after a fortnight with Proust no progress has been made, and give up in disgust - 'Where is this novel going?'. How is one to keep a new reader from being discouraged, especially one who points to shorter works, more obviously dense in meaning?

One such author whose work has always moved me greatly is William Faulkner. No stamina problems here - Faulkner novels tend to be short and easy to carry around in a shirt pocket. Arguably his greatest novel (and the only novelother than RoTP which I wanted to reread immediately) is The Sound and The Fury, his complex, tragic tale of the Compson family, set in Mississippi.There is quite a gulf between turn of the century Paris and the deep south of America , but more connects the two novels than is immediately apparent. The Sound and The Fury is divided into four parts, each narrated by a different person, but broadly describing the same events. The first part is told by a congenitally retarded man, with no conception of the passage of time. Stream of consciousness in the extreme, it is challenging reading. Events, described confusingly and full of apparent contradiction, tumble down the pages, one after the other, with no apparent connection between them. It leaves the reader bewildered. What is going on? Who are these people? In part two little more is uncovered. By part three things are beginning to fall into place. The wandering seeming nonsense of part one has told us more than we realised. In part four, all is revealed, everything comes into focus and the whole story makes sense, with an emotional impact which leaves the reader astonished. It really has to be read to be believed.

I was surprised to experience a similar moment of wonder at the end of RoTP. The narrator is introduced to the granddaughter of Swann, and as each connection between them is described, each memory touched upon, (by now distilled to single words of the most profound meaning: Venice, Combray,Balbec, Saint-Loup, Albertine) every event, every smell, every character seemed as real to me as any memory of my own. Proust sows his seeds of memory and remembrance throughout the course of the novel, and they bear fruit at every stage, but only at the very end do we see a whole orchard, a silently growing garden, which has materialised around us, perhaps while we were looking only at one flower.

Although the journey is a beautiful one, full of insight, wit and profound wisdom, the cumulative effect of these experiences provides the novel with its emotional intensity, depth and richness. Over thousands of pages Proust layers memory on memory to provide a distillation of his, and every, life. Faulkner planted his memories by scrambling them, placing them in your mind surreptitiously, and just as you were most confused, secretly creating the whole emotional structure of the novel. Proust does it all in plain sight, and as he lays his foundations slowly, methodically, one brick at a time, you see only one brick, however attractive that brick may be. What a surprise when he pulls away the sheets and reveals a cathedral.

Both authors would no doubt have appreciated a painting by Holbein known as The Ambassadors. In a portrait of two wealthy looking men, the observer issurprised to see a dark oblong blob at their feet. Only when standing directlybelow it does one see the shapeless form foreshortened into a human skull. In what seems a conventional portrait, even amongst every symbol of vitality and power, the artist places a cryptic and mysterious reference to mortality. A transformation occurs, because the viewer is forced to look again at what he has seen, and more to the point, what he has missed.These touches of genius, so different, so divided by time and distance, so similar in spirit, are what makes them unique to everyone who experiences them, makes them real, alive and contemporary. And that is why I believe that ten pages removed from the longest novel I have ever read would ruin it.

P Segal