This book describes how Proust’s dependence on signs forms the core of his philosophy. Translated from the French by Richard Howard. The essential work on Proust–now in paperback! In a remarkable instance of literary and philosophical interpretation, the incomparable Gilles Deleuze reads Marcel Proust’s work as a narrative of an apprenticeship–more precisely, the apprenticeship of a man of letters. Considering the search to be one directed by an experience of signs, in which the protagonist learns to interpret and decode the kinds and types of symbols that surround him, Deleuze conducts us on a corollary search–one that leads to a new understanding of the signs that constitute A la recherche du temps perdu.