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I don't like Proust, but I'll play devil's advocate.

Overly long meandearing sentences are very much the point of those books. The form and content reflect each others.

War and Peace is also just a style exercise fashionable at that time among russian (and elsewhere) literary authors.

It's like a fantasy author writing an "epic fantasy", what makes it "epic" compared to regular, largely it's the number of words.

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Yeah, Proust's works are almost meditations. For me it took a concerted effort to get into his rhythm and not tire, but once I did, I found it more rewarding than most of the fiction I've read. There's a deeply personal effect to following him interrogate, for pages and pages, the experience of a fleeting sensation we're usually only subconsciously aware of. I think about this[0] passage a lot.

[0] http://art.arts.usf.edu/content/articlefiles/2330-Excerpt%20...

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