Swann's Way

By Marcel Proust

Book Overview

From the French novelist, essayist, critic, and one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century: the first volume of his monumental masterpiece, one of the most sensitive renderings of childhood in fiction and a brilliant meditation on the recreation of the past through memory and art.

In C. K. Scott Moncrieff's heralded original English translation, as revised by Terence Kilmartin based on the definitive French Pl iade edition.

Swann's Way is the most frequently read part of Proust's epic novel, Remembrance of Things Past (also known as In Search of Lost Time). It introduces subjects that resonate throughout the entire work, including the narrator's love for Swann's daughter Gilberte, Swann's jealous passion for Odette, and the rise of the nouveaux-riches Verdurins. Proust's narrator vividly recalls his childhood in Paris and Combray, most famously in a fraught evocation of his mother's good-night kiss and in the iconic scene where the taste of a madeleine dipped in tea brings back a flood of memory.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 067972009X
• ISBN13: 9780679720096
• Release Date: March 1989
• Publisher: Vintage
• Length: 496 Pages
• Weight: 0.93 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 5.2" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

At last! A readable copy.

This is not a literary review (We all know what Swann's Way is about), but my way of expressing relief that at last I have a readable copy of it. Out goes my old Folio paperback with its miniscule print -- Hooray!

Proust the Yenta

When I first read this novel 35 years ago, I found a button in a head shop that read, "PROUST IS A YENTA." It's true. Proust is, underneath all the vivid and evocative prose, a fellow who loves to dish the dirt, and the more sordid the better. Poor Swann! In love with a two-timing hussy who takes him for all he's worth and alienates all his haute-bourgeois friends in the process. Amazing the lengths Proust goes to to tell this simple tale! No metaphorical stone goes unturned (as it were), no perfervid phrase unused, no nuance of ratiocinated feeling unnoticed. If you are a Proust neophyte, understand that single sentences sometimes go on for more than a page and that paragraphs often take multiple pages to unfold -- that every diamond has infinite facets and all are examined. Only late Henry James rivals Proust in the complexity of his sentence sructures which seek to eke out the essence of the quintessence of feelings. The effete narrator (for truly he defines the word "effete") spends the first 150 pages of the novel dissecting nostalgia for his childhood. Only after these rarified ramblings does he deign to tell us poor Swann's story! Well, no one reads Proust for the tales. Either you'll think he's the greatest stylist of any language ever, or you'll stop reading after the first page. You may need a large dose of Elmore Leonard after reading Proust just to cleanse the palate! Still, there's nothing quite like it.