Proust's novel holds a world record, which is a strange thing for a book about memory and jealousy to be famous for. The record is real, the numbers around it are messier than they look, and the more interesting figure is how long he spent putting them there.
The Numbers, and How Far to Trust Them
Guinness states the record in characters rather than words, which is a tell. Counting characters removes the argument about hyphenation and contractions, and it also sidesteps the question of which language you're counting. The published figure is 9,609,000 characters, spaces included.
The word count you'll see everywhere, 1,267,069, is oddly precise for a number nobody can source. It appears in reference entries and on literary sites with no footnote and no statement of which text was counted, and the French original and the various English translations would each give a different answer. Page counts wander too, from about 3,031 in some editions up to 4,215 in others.
Round it to 1.2 million words and you're safe. For scale, that's larger than the entire Harry Potter series, which comes to about 1,084,170 words across seven books. Proust got there in one.
Thirteen Years, and It Kept Growing
Proust started shaping the novel around 1909 and was still revising when he died on 18 November 1922. Three volumes appeared in his lifetime: Swann's Way in 1913, Within a Budding Grove in 1919, which won the Prix Goncourt, and The Guermantes Way across 1920 and 1921. His brother Robert saw the last three into print between 1923 and 1927, working from drafts that were never finished to Proust's standard.
Spread 1.2 million words across thirteen years and the average lands near 260 words a day. That number describes almost nothing about how he worked. He wrote in long nocturnal sittings in a cork-lined bedroom, sometimes through to six or seven in the morning, then went silent for stretches when the asthma won.
The growth is the real story. Proust's manuscripts are famous for the paperoles, strips of paper glued onto notebook pages and printer's proofs when the margins ran out, some of them long enough to unfold across a table. Whole passages that readers now consider central, including the death of Bergotte, first appear in those late additions. The book got substantially longer at every stage, including at proof stage, which printers hated and which is part of why the numbers are so hard to fix.
Why the Length Is the Point
A novel about the recovery of time through involuntary memory needs enough duration for the reader to have forgotten things. The famous madeleine sequence works because you've been inside the book long enough for the effect to land on you rather than merely be described to you. Nobody has ever successfully abridged In Search of Lost Time without gutting the thing that makes it work.
For a working writer, that's the useful takeaway from the record. The length is the minimum size at which the book's central trick becomes possible, which is a very different thing from ambition for its own sake. For more on the conditions Proust built to sustain it, see how Proust wrote In Search of Lost Time.
It costs the reader accordingly. At an average adult reading pace of around 250 words a minute, 1.2 million words is roughly eighty hours of reading, which is why so many people own the first volume and so few own the seventh. The Prix Goncourt for Within a Budding Grove in 1919 was the moment the French literary establishment decided the investment was worth making, six years after Swann's Way had been turned down by several publishers, including the Nouvelle Revue Francaise on André Gide's advice, and finally issued at Proust's own expense.
Reading how Marcel Proust worked is the easy part. The Writer's Daily Practice gives you a page for every morning of the year, and each one ends with a prompt to get you writing.
Get the Book on Amazon →365 mornings, in paperback and Kindle.
What You Can Steal
- Let the form dictate the length. Proust's book is long because the effect he wanted needs time to build in the reader.
- Keep adding in revision if the book asks for it. The paperoles exist because Proust kept finding what the novel needed after he thought it was done.
- Thirteen years at 260 words a day is a world record. Slow and continuous beats fast and abandoned.
- Build the conditions the work requires. The cork walls and the reversed clock were engineering, not eccentricity.