Between taking numerous saunas and swimming in the Baltic Sea, I also managed to read fifteen hundred pages of Proust's Remembrance of Things Past. It's great stuff, especially on vacation, where the absence of other distractions allows you to unpack a monster sentence that might otherwise not seem worth the trouble. Noah, I especially recommend the self-contained "Swann in Love" section, which includes as obsessive a description of the relationship between love and pop music as anything this side of Nick Hornby. Whenever Proust devotes all four cylinders to describing some aspect of human experience, you feel as though nothing else need ever be said; for one amazing example, see his essay on kissing near the beginning of Chapter Two of The Guermantes Way.

The best way I can think to describe Proust is by drawing a parallel to Homeric epic. The performative nature of oral poetics means that the poem is infinitely expansible; knowing the interests of his audience, the poet might decide to linger on a scene between two characters or treat it in a couple of lines in order to get to more interesting stuff. You can see this most clearly in the Iliad's battle scenes: some duels take a line, others last for pages, but even the shortest of encounters could be stretched into a whole evening's worth of poetry by expanding an epithet, for example, into the hero's life story, or by extending their speeches, or by augmenting the action with a few well-chosen metaphors.

In Proust, every sentence is expanded to its maximum capacity. Another novelist might spend a line or two describing his beloved's face; Proust begins with the face, then disgresses into thoughts on faces in general, then on the phenomenon of perception and memory, then, reminded by his lover's face of a particular landscape, talks a bit about sunsets or the ocean, and then of landscape painting, and then of art criticism, until, somehow, the sentence deposits us back where we began, on lady's lovely cheek. The result is a novel that manages to thoroughly describe every aspect of human experience through three thousand pages of metaphors and digressions, while encompassing action that, in the hands of another author, would barely fill a novelette.