Clara Reads Proust

Clara is a young hairdresser. She works in a salon called Cindy Coiffure in the French city of Chalon sur Soane. The salon is tucked away in an alley and it's a fairly sleepy place. It's clientele tend to be older women, who've been coming to the place for years, and continue to do so out of loyalty.

Clara leads a fairly humdrum life. She has her job which pays the bills, her colleagues who are nice enough, a firefighter boyfriend that she's fallen out of love with, a cat who's a serious introvert, and her family who she sees quite often. It's a life that she's sort of made peace with.

Then something happens to shake things up. A customer comes into the salon and leaves a book behind. The book is Swann's Way, the first part of In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust.

Clara's not a reader, but she takes the book home and starts reading it. It's tough going initially, what with Proust's extra-long sentences, the detailed descriptions of people, places, feelings and sensations, and the depth and nuance of his thought and language. It's almost too much for her.

But she keeps going, and she slowly finds her footing. She has to learn how to read Proust, and once she does, she cannot stop. The more she reads, the more deeply she thinks about her own life. She starts to see the people around her more clearly, and to be more aware of her own thoughts and feelings. She finds herself wanting more from life, and remarkably, things start to change.

This is a lovely story, told simply, about the power of reading, and the subtle ways in which it can change the way we think and the way we see life. The author quotes from In Search of Lost Time liberally through the narrative and leaves you with a genuine desire to get to know this remarkable book.