11. The longest novel

Morsel:

Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (Remembrance of Things Past or In Search of Lost Time) is the longest novel at 9,609,000 characters or roughly 1.3 million words.

Meal:

What makes a novel the longest novel? Do you count by each individual character, so each individual letter, number, space, and so on? Or do you count by word? But what then with languages like Chinese whose separation of character and word is not as clear cut as in English? Does the novel have to be finished or can we count uncompleted works too, but, if so, can we really regard them yet as 'novels'? Does the novel have to be picked up by a publisher or can it be self-published? Must it be printed or does electronically publishing suffice as well? Does the novel have to be one single book, one single work, or can a series of volumes that form one epic saga be considered a single 'novel'?

The difficulty of establishing what criteria one should base themselves on when deciding the longest novel opens up many candidates to being awarded this conspicuous accolade. In the morsel, I chose the novel selected by the Guinness World Records. In Search of Lost Time by French author Marcel Proust, we follow the narrator's recollections of childhood and beyond in late 19^th century and 20^th century France. A story which consists of nearly 1.3 million words.

Guinness World Records appear to use the number of characters or words and the fact that the work was published as the deciding factors. However, there is a novel that exceeds Proust's work in word count while maintaing Guinness's presumed criteria. Artamène ou le Grand Cyrus (Artamène, or Cyrus the Great) by French author(s) Georges de Scudéry and/or his sister Madeleine (source explains uncertainty).

Written between 1649 and 1653, the novel contains over 400 characters and over 100 settings, which are described over 8000 pages. The novel was originally conceived for public, non-linear readings, which is perhaps a reason Guinness why chose to exclude it. The novel's word count is apparently about 1,954,300 words, if one does a word count command on the novel's text, which can be found online.

There is another printed work of about two million words, the novel Les Hommes de bonne volonté (Men of Good Will). This epic by the French author Jules Romains chronicles French life from 6^th October 1908 to 7^th October 1933 published over 27 volumes. Unfortunately, I could not find any good source for the claim that the novel has two million words but it is certainly a lengthy work nonetheless.

What is probably indisputably the longest published novel is the epic Nansō Satomi Hakkenden (Tale of Eight Dogs) by Japanese author Kyokutei Bakin, written and published over 30 years from 1814 to 1842. It tells the story of eight samurais, all bearing the word “dog” in their surnames, and their adventures. The total work amounts to reportedly 106 volumes.

And then there are efforts of love and labour that exceed even these novels, but were not published. One is the extremely long novel Marienbad My Love by American author Mark Leach. It tells the story of an exiled journalist-turned-filmmaker who tries to persuade a woman from his past to help him make a pastiche to the old French film, Last Year at Marienbad. According to the novel's website, 17.8 million words are stretched across 17 volumes, which were written over 30 years and self-published.

Another is the 15,145-page long novel entitled The Story of the Vivian Girls, in what is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion. American author Henry Darger wrote and illustrated his magnum opus for the majority of his life in complete solitude with the enormous scale of his work not being known until after his death. He is now regarded as a well-respected figure in 'outsider art'.

Finally, we came to the unfinished (or perhaps finished) novel Breeze Avenue by American author Richard Grossman. This work is, from what I understand, not like any typical novel. It is unclear if the novel has an overarching plot, but it covers topics ranging from art and film history to quantum mechanics and is written in many languages other than English, such as Latin, Japanese, Hebrew, and even American Sign language. A collaborative effort, Grossman and many others have been working on the novel for 35 years and attend to mass three million pages.

It is unlikely anything will ever exceed this, at least not for a very long time.

Recipe:

Anon. n.d. “Longest Novel.” Guinness World Rrecords.

Anon. n.d. “Some Technical Facts about Rembrance (in French).” Université Paris-Est, Laboratoire d’Informatique de l’Institut Gaspard Monge, Equipe Signal et Communications.

Bourqui, Claude and Alexandre Gefen. n.d. “Oeuvre (in French).”

Bourqui, Claude and Alexandre Gefen. n.d. “MAKING THE ‘UNREADABLE’ READABLE : THE LONGEST FRENCH NOVEL ON LINE.”

Leach, Mark. n.d. “Marienbad My Love.”

Polanski, Jurek. n.d. “HENRY DARGER: Realms of the Unreal.”

Grossman, Richard. n.d. “Breeze Avenue.”