In Search of Lost Time: Swann's Way v. 1 (Modern Library) - Softcover

Proust, Marcel

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0375751548 ISBN 13: 9780375751547

Publisher: Modern Library Inc, 1998

Synopsis

The final volume of In Search of Lost Time chronicles the years of World War I, when, as M. de Charlus reflects on a moonlit walk, Paris threatens to become another Pompeii. Years later, after the war's end, Proust's narrator returns to Paris, where Mme. Verdurin has become the Princesse de Guermantes. He reflects on time, reality, jealousy, artistic creation, and the raw material for literature - his past life. This volume also includes the indispensable Guide to Proust, an index to all six volumes of the novel. The final volume of a new, definitive text of A la recherche du temps perdu was published by the Bibliotheque de la Pleiade in 1989. For this authoritative English-language edition, D. J. Enright has revised the late Terence Kilmartin's acclaimed reworking of C. K. Scott Moncrieff's translation to take into account the new French editions.

About this title

Review:

"Reading Swann's Way was a rapturous experience."--David Denby

From the Back Cover:

'I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. No sooner had the warm liquid, and the crumbs with it, touched my palate than a shudder ran through my whole body...An exquisite sensation had invaded my senses...I decided to attempt to make it reappear. I retrace my thoughts to the moment at which I drank the first spoonful of tea...And suddenly the memory returns.'

Published in 1913, 'Swann's Way' is the first of the seven parts of Marcel Proust's masterpiece, 'Remembrance of Things Past', one of the major achievements of twentieth-century literature. The narrator discovers that an involuntary memory triggered by some casual action – say, eating a madeleine cake or stooping to remove one's shoe – has the power to recover large areas of the past; and he sets out to resurrect his past life and the people and places that most affected him. 'Swann's Way', which is offered here in the celebrated translation by C. K. Scott Moncrieff, focuses particularly on Charles Swann and his love for Odette.

"I don't think there has ever been in the whole of literature such an example of the power of analysis."
JOSEPH CONRAD

About this edition

• Publisher: Modern Library Inc
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0375751548
• ISBN 13: 9780375751547
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 640