 By 1910 he was at work on "À la recherche du temps perdu".Begun in 1909, when Proust was 38 years old, "À la recherche du temps perdu" consists of seven volumes totaling around 3,200 pages (about 4,300 in The Modern Library's translation) and featuring more than 2,000 characters.Graham Greene called Proust the "greatest novelist of the 20th century", and W. Somerset Maugham called the novel the "greatest fiction to date".