Next month marks the 100th anniversary of the publication of "Swann's Way," the first volume of Marcel Proust's six-volume masterpiece "In Search of Lost Time." The novel is about a man compelled by a sudden surge of memory to revisit his past and, in the process, to draw meaning out of his seemingly uneventful life. Its unfolding is prompted, famously, by the narrator's dunking of a madeleine in a cup of herbal tea.

Proust Through the Years

Marcel Proust in the garden of Reyhaldo Hahn, 1905. See more photos of Proust through his life. Snark/Art Resource, NY

Untold universities have planned at least one reading or roundtable dedicated to Proust. Every self-respecting bookstore will hold its own Proustathon, with authors, actors and book lovers reading snippets from his epic novel. The Center for Fiction in New York has scheduled a Proust evening, and the French embassy is organizing its own Proust occasion. There are Proust T-shirts, Proust coffee mugs, Proust watches, Proust comic series, Proust tote bags, Proust fountain pens, and Proust paraphernalia of all stripes.

Still, for all the brouhaha, many modern readers still find themselves in agreement with the two French publishers who turned down Proust's manuscript in 1912. A third agreed to publish it, provided that Proust himself cover the expenses. As one early reader declared: "At the end of this 712-page manuscript…one has no notion of…what it is about. What is it all for? What does it all mean? Where is it all leading to?" The writer André Gide is said to have avoided even reading the manuscript on grounds that the author was a renowned socialite snob. What could a wealthy, delicate fop like Proust possibly have to tell anyone?

A great deal, it turns out.

Proust's novel is so unusually ambitious, so accomplished, so masterful in cadence and invention that it is impossible to compare it with anyone else's. He is unabashedly literary and so unapologetic in his encyclopedic range that he remains an exemplar of what literature can be: at once timeless and time bound, universal and elitist, a mix of uncompromising high seriousness with moments of undiminished slapstick. Homer, Vergil, Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, Proust—not exactly authors one expects to whiz through or take lightly, but like all works of genius, they are meant to be read out loud and loved.

Nothing would have shocked Proust more than to hear that his work was perceived as difficult or inaccessibly rarefied. For years I have taught Proust to students at Bard High School in New York City, and I often find that after two or three hours with the novel, they are hooked.

After all, the story couldn't be simpler. It's about a young man of an unspecified age who enjoys reading, who is shy and introspective, but not necessarily awkward or antisocial, who likes his mother, who wants to travel to Venice but, because of poor health, never quite manages to do so until later in life. Marcel, the hero of Proust's autobiographical novel, loves nature, music, restaurants, hotels, beaches, churches, art, theater, Paris, fantasizes about friendships and girls, dissects the grown-ups around him with no less unforgiving irony and acuity than when he studies himself, and ultimately worships the good and beautiful things of life, hoping one day to craft the story of his maturation as a human being and as an artist.

Proust is interested in minutiae because life, as he sees it, is seldom ever about things, but about our impression of things, not about facts, but about the interpretation of facts, not about one particular feeling but about a confluence of conflicting feelings. Everything is elusive in Proust, because nothing is ever certain. He isn't interested in characters the way Tolstoy and Dickens are interested in characters; he is interested in the vivisection of identity, in people who turn out to be everything they claim they are not, in relationships that are always inscrutably opaque, in situations that conceal an underside that ends up flattering neither the betrayer nor the betrayed. It is Proust's implacable honesty, his reluctance to cut corners or to articulate what might have been good enough or credible enough in any other writer that make him the introspective genius he is.

All great writers hold mirrors to their readers. In Proust's case, he holds a magnifying glass, not to showcase the blighted peculiarities of his characters but to introduce us to one character we might recognize but are not always eager to know better: ourselves. To read Proust and not to find ourselves in every paragraph is simply to misread Proust. To read him is to learn that we are never introspective or candid or, for that matter, bold enough to admit what we feel, much less what we want. As for the love we all claim to crave, it is so gnarled and incomprehensible that when it happens to us, it shows up with a face so distorted, that we would seldom recognize it if we didn't already know its other name was jealousy, spite, and cruelty.

As Proust recognized, who we are to the outside world and who we are when we retire into our private space are often two very different individuals. Proust the snob and Proust the artist may share the same address, the same friends, and the same name, even the same habits; but one belongs to society, the other to eternity.

To the outside world, Marcel Proust was handsome, charming, quick-witted, kind, learned, seductive, highly gifted, and brilliant. He was also very wealthy and a highly sought-after member of some of the most affluent circles in French society. The question to ask, however, isn't what more could he have wanted, or what went wrong, or why was so jovial a person so profoundly solitary and sad, but why with so many gifts as a writer did he wait so very, very long to pick up his pen?

The answer is not in the novel. The answer is the novel.

—Mr. Aciman is distinguished professor of comparative literature at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and the author, most recently, of the novel "Harvard Square."