Your parents liked to snort crank and fuck in the back of an old civic

Of course, the key high-profile compositional distinction between the works indubitably lies in the national and lingual preferences of the authors. Even translated into English, Proust's prose flows with a delicate yet quintessential French-ness, floating along like a feather caught in a draft, pleasantly at first, but gradually worn into a threadbare skeleton that ultimately collapses in on itself by merit of its own faint weight and flight duration. Meanwhile Joyce's thick Irish brogue seeps into a nigh-incomprehensible mishmash of onomatopoeic nightmares and deliberate subversions of every major trope in both English literature and the language itself.

Somewhat counter-intuitively, this presents a rich breeding ground for points of comparison and contention, as both manage to press up against the boundaries of excessive and unbearable in their respective manners.

The authors didn't let their similarities stop there, either. Both left the works in a tragically incomplete manner, though it becomes easy for one to imagine when such colossally nontraditional works would have a frame of reference under which we could even possibly determine whether they were properly finished.