Dance to the Music of Time, by Anthony Powell (1905–2000) is 12 volumes of autobiographical fiction & even though I'm only halfway through I am already looking ahead to—well, starting it again, most likely.
It's fun to run across gems like the below but reading the whole thing is like floating in a warm pool on the first day of vacation: you can't imagine ever doing anything better.
Some Powell quotations:
The nearest some women get to being faithful to their husband is making it unpleasant for their lover.
It is no more normal to be a bank-manager or a bus-conductor than to be Baudelaire or Genghis Khan. It just happens there are more of the former types.
Nothing dates people more than the standards from which they have chosen to react.
His mastery of the hard-luck story was of a kind never achieved by persons not wholly concentrated on themselves.
From the Guardian's obit, which like many others calls him the English Proust: "He will stand as essentially a comic writer in the English tradition—comic in the least uproarious way imaginable, reflective and often melancholic, the strong social spine to his work being the one distinctively uncommon feature in a branch of writing remarkable more for eccentricity than togetherness."