I could hear the whistling of trains, which, now nearer and now farther off, punctuating the distance like the note of a bird in a forest, shewed me in perspective the deserted countryside through which a traveller would be hurrying towards the nearest station: the path that he followed being fixed for ever in his memory by the general excitement due to being in a strange place, to doing unusual things, to the last words of conversation, to farewells exchanged beneath an unfamiliar lamp which echoed still in his ears amid the silence of the night and to the delightful prospect of being once again at home. Here’s an example of a Proustian sentence from the beginning of Swann’s Way: In the final decade and a half of his life, Proust wrote the monumental seven-part novel À la recherche du temps perdu ( In Search of Lost Time), which is famous not only for being one of the world’s longest novels-some 1,267,069 words total-but for Proust’s extraordinary descriptive powers and lengthy, winding-“Proustian”-sentences. O ne of the giants of literary modernism, Marcel Proust, was born 10 July 1871. Proust in 1900, photo by Otto Wegener (1849-1924), via Wikimedia Commons
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