Pictures Worth Thousands of Words.

EVEN before Marcel Proust died in 1922, ordering iced beer from the Ritz on his deathbed, his monumental novel about art and memory was being dissected for wisdom on a stunning variety of topics. It has been celebrated for its obsessions with everything from Norman architecture to optics, homosexuality, classical music, botany, tactical warfare, fin de siecle fashion and princely copper-pot French cuisine. (In one passage the narrator describes Francoise, the enduring housekeeper, combing Les Halles for the choicest cuts of meat, like Michelangelo in Carrara, ''selecting the most perfect blocks of marble for the tomb of Pope Julius II.'') [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]