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imagery, their manipulation of time or their privileging of memory. Javier Marías’ three-volume novel Your Face Tomorrow, for example (first published in Spanish 2002–7), has been widely praised and compared, on various levels, to In Search of Lost Time.21 Among many examples in francophone literature one might consider Andreï Makine’s Le Testament français (1995; English translation 1997), whose shifting narrative perspectives and treatment of memory has led commentators to remark its ‘Proustian’ qualities.22 Orhan Pamuk’s The Black Book (1990; first English translation 1995), whose central narrative thread of a man searching for his wife after her disappearance divides into a panoply of mini-narratives and searches for identity, truth and meaning, can be read as a re-writing of The Fugitive. Acknowledgement of this is made in one episode where the protagonist, Galip, describes a man for whom the ‘only tremor in his quiet life was when Marcel Proust enticed him into reading A la recherche du temps perdu’ and who, reaching the end of the book, returns to the beginning and starts over, spending the remainder of his life alone in his apartment, save for his cat, telling and retelling himself the story of the Narrator and Albertine.23

Diverging from this sort of homage, or the echoes found, say, in the writing about food and love in Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections (2001), or in John Banville’s lexical precision, his imagery and handling of childhood and ageing, yoked painfully together by memory, in The Sea (2005), two novels stand out that offer a more overt and comprehensive ‘use’ of Proust in the creative process. Jacqueline Rose’s Albertine (2001) is a fascinating, imaginative rewriting of Albertine’s story, told from her perspective and that of Andrée.24 The novel draws on scenes from Proust’s fiction as well as his life; it shifts the dynamics of the Search’s central relationship and imaginatively makes heard voices often silenced by the Narrator. Like Rose’s Albertine, Kate Taylor’s Madame Proust and the Kosher Kitchen (2003) is a debut novel in which female voices dominate.25 The tale of Marie Prévost, a young, modern-day Canadian who travels to Paris for a new start and explores the Proust manuscripts in the Bibliothèque Nationale is interwoven with ‘translated’ passages from the fictional diary of Proust’s mother that she finds there as well as the story of Sarah Bensimon, the mother of the man from whom Marie fled to France, a Parisian Jewish woman sent to Canada to avoid capture during the war, who finds solace in later life by reproducing kosher versions of traditional French dishes. Taylor explores identity, memory and love across time and space in a complex, multifaceted narrative whose structures and thematic concerns have a distinctly Proustian flavour.

Less sustained but similarly inventive homage is found in Georges Perec’s 35 Variations sur Proust: these exercises in style, themselves a homage to Raymond Queneau, were originally published in a number of the Magazine littéraire devoted to the latter in 1974. Perec rewrites the opening sentence of Proust’s novel whilst conforming to various constraints, ranging from anagrams to alexandrine metre: so doing he introduces readers to the tenets of the OuLiPo (Ouvroir de littérature potentielle – Workshop of Potential Literature), a group that makes a virtue out of formal constraints in the production of literary texts, and highlights yet again the multiplicities, the vast potential of even the briefest snippets of Proust’s prose.26

While the Narrator ponders the afterlife that Bergotte’s books represent for the author in The Captive, later in Time Regained when he himself is nearer to death he tempers this suggestion with the sober observation that eternal life is no more granted to works of art than it is to men. This may be so, but judging by the critical and creative responses, the varied cultural and commercial appropriations of the author and his work in the years – almost a century – since its publication began, we can safely say that Proust’s mark