Manchester band The Fall's maverick founding (and ever-present) member Mark E. Smith got the band's name from the Camus novel of the same name. André Gide's 1902 novel "The Immoralist" is also set in North Africa, in Tunisia to be precise. He had travelled widely there, befriending Irish author Oscar Wilde along the way. Gide could equal Wilde in the art of the bon mot, one of my favourites being: "Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But since no one was listening, everything must be said again." Proust's mammoth novel is awesome, in the true sense of the word. Despite its length, it's actually an accessible read for anyone who loves words and the art of the novel. In his "Lectures On Literature", literary luminary Vladimir Nabokov talks about Proust's style as "a wealth of metaphorical imagery, layer upon layer of comparisons. It is through this prism that we view the beauty of Proust's work. A tendency to fill in and stretch out a sentence to its utmost breadth and length, to cram into the stocking of the sentence a miraculous number of clauses, parenthetic phrases, subordinate clauses, sub-subordinate clauses. Indeed in verbal generosity he is a veritable Santa."

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