It wasn't a total wash. I had to push through to the end, but it wasn't as if I was picking up the book with dread or putting it off.

The book is very boring. There are some beautiful moments of introspection, but there are pages and pages, sentences and sentences of rather dull introspection that weigh everything down. It's relentlessly descriptive. I think this was the style of the time. It reminded me of Henry James, who I found similarly dense and long winded but more interesting (in Portrait of a Lady at least). The parts in Combray were the most difficult whereas reading about Swann was mostly tolerable until the latter part of his section - then he became, in the language of the Verdurins, a bore.

I suspect part of the difficulty is the translation, as I often do when reading anything in translation. I believe the Moncrieff version is supposed to be faithful, but while the passages of artistic introspection are occasionally interesting and thought provoking, they're rarely breath taking. Maybe it's better in the original French. I have liked (and liked a lot!) other modernists in Joyce Faulkner, Woolf, Nabokov - but those were written in and meant to be read in English (mostly).