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THE MAJOR NOVELS of the twentieth century are Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time, which was published in sections from 1913 to 1927, Proust himself dying in 1922 at the age of fifty-one, and the Ulysses of James Joyce, composed between 1917 and 1922. Joyce died in 1941, not quite fifty-nine. I do not believe that Proust ever read Joyce, though they met at one Parisian dinner, and complained to each other about their mutual bad health. Joyce read Swann's Way (1913) and thought it was quite ordinary, but nevertheless attended Proust's funeral.
I can think of only one peer of Proust and Ulysses, and that has to be Finnegans Wake, published by Joyce in 1939 after seventeen years of extraordinary labor. If forced to choose between Proust, Ulysses, and the Wake, I would be very unhappy. Emotionally, I am more turned inside out by In Search of Lost Time, but the Wake is hilarious, once you have read it a few times, and Ulysses has a richness that all but rivals Dante and Shakespeare. Readers are likelier to absorb Proust and Ulysses than to accommodate the Wake. I hope to reread all of Finnegans Wake at least once more ere I depart, but I reread Proust and Ulysses several times a year.