A lively and alert book. – É. Philippe, Les Inrocks.

A tender moment of reading, a first-person narrative full of self-mockery and intelligence. – S. Joly, Paris-ci la Culture.

At the age when boys start to take a close interest in young girls in bloom, Jacques Bartel, an ordinary teenager whose inner life is as rich as his social life is dull, discovers an idol: Marcel Proust. His whole life is now “Proustian dominated”. His parents are worried, especially his mother, who has read in a book that Proust was a homosexual (and even a regular in brothels!). As the years go by, Jacques naturally becomes a researcher in literature, a specialist in Proust, devoted body and soul to his passion, which in the end, it must be said, does not lead him to much. Unless, from vain research to lost time, a necessary metamorphosis is announced…