However, his position there was also one of an outsider, due to his Jewishness and homosexuality. He was active in Parisian high society during the 80s and 90s, welcomed in the most fashionable and exclusive salons of his day. Marcel Proust was a French novelist, best known for his 3000 page masterpiece À la recherche du temps perdu ( Remembrance of Things Past or In Search of Lost Time), a pseudo-autobiographical novel told mostly in a stream-of-consciousness style.īorn in the first year of the Third Republic, the young Marcel, like his narrator, was a delicate child from a bourgeois family. The first volume of the work that established Proust as one of the finest voices of the modern age - satirical, skeptical, confiding, and endlessly varied in its response to the human condition - Swann's Way also stands on its own as a perfect rendering of a life in art, of the past re-created through memory. It also enfolds the short novel 'Swann in Love,' an incomparable study of sexual jealousy that becomes a crucial part of the vast, unfolding structure of In Search of Lost Time. Swann's Way is one of the preeminent novels of childhood: a sensitive boy's impressions of his family and neighbors, all brought dazzlingly back to life years later by the taste of a madeleine.

Now, Penguin brings Proust's masterpiece to new audiences throughout the world, beginning with Lydia Davis's internationally acclaimed translation of the first volume, Swann's Way. But since its original prewar translation there has been no completely new version in English.

Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time is one of the most entertaining reading experiences in any language and arguably the finest novel of the twentieth century.

Swann's way book