This book is a critical study of Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu, focussing on the role of the acts of reading depicted in the novel. Reading is shown to be a formative and often troubling force in the life of the novel’s narrator. The book tracks the interconnections of his developing awareness of the complexities of reading and his gradually unfolding considerations of intelligence, sense experience, knowledge and desire. The novel’s scenes of reading implicitly invite us to reflect on the act we ourselves accomplish as we interpret A la recherche. The book shows how the ‘delirium’ often encountered in scenes of reading allies them to the workings of involuntary memory. The revelations as well as the wrong turns made in reading intimate the creative potential of the mind as well as the instability of the relation between the body, the intellect and the world around us.