Pick Of The Picture Books: Paintings in Proust

No great novelist intrigues, or overawes, potential readers more than Marcel Proust. How can any newcomer dip a toe into the vast rolling stream of In Search of Lost Time and find the confidence to swim and not drown? Although not designed as a novices-start-here guide, Eric Karpeles' gorgeous and fascinating book Paintings in Proust (Thames & Hudson, £25) offers a sumptuous tasting menu of the work.

The retired Parisian dandy may have lived with bare walls on Boulevard Haussmann, but there his visual imagination soared. Descriptions of artworks swarm through Proust's seven volumes, as triggers to feelings and events rather than as mere decoration. Karpeles reproduces more than 200 paintings and drawings mentioned in the narrative and, on the facing page, prints the relevant passage.

Vermeer's "View of Delft" obsessed Proust. In The Captive, the novelist Bergotte dies in a terminal swoon of bliss in front of the canvas: "In a celestial pair of scales there appeared to him, weighing down one of the pans, his own life, while the other contained the little patch of wall so beautifully painted in yellow. He felt that he had rashly sacrificed the former for the latter."