In Search of Lost Time - Marcel Proust

This book

Synopsis
Reviews
Product details

About Marcel Proust

In Search of Lost Time

The Way by Swann's

» Marcel Proust

Translator - Lydia Davis

Editor - Christopher Prendergast

Penguin Classic
Paperback : 02 Oct 2003

£9.99

» Buy now

'The latest Penguin Proust is a triumph, and will bring this inexhaustible artwork to new audiences throughout the English-speaking world'
Malcolm Bowie, Sunday Telegraph

Synopsis

The Way by Swann’s is one of the great novels of childhood, depicting the impressions of a sensitive boy of his family and neighbours, brought dazzlingly back to life by the famous taste of a madeleine. It contains the separate short novel, A Love of Swann’s, a study of sexual jealousy that forms a crucial part of the vast, unfolding structure of In Search of Lost Time. This book established Proust as one of the greatest voices of the modern age – satirical, sceptical, confiding and endlessly varied in his response to the human condition.

» Back to top

Reviews

Customer Review: 30 January 2008

Reviewer: Tonnvane Wiswell

This book is, despite its length, one of the classics of Western literature - no apologies or footnotes needed. Finish the first chapter with the infamous "dunking of the madeleine" and you will be sucked in. While this book seems to be about a cutesy, whiny brat's experience growing up in France in the 1870s (or so), the addition of A Love of Swann's gives the reader a chance to see what a masterful(and modern) interpreter of human emotions Proust is. It makes a time in the past come alive, but what it more importantly does is make the characters within the book come alive, each more vibrant than the next, not one of them drawn in two dimensions. Take your time reading it if you can and don't rush so that you can better savor the flavors of this book, and, with luck, you'll aquire a taste for finishing the rest of the set. It's a year and a half later and I'm four volumes in and absolutely committed to finishing them all!

» Submit a review

Critic Review:

‘A treasure hunt where the treasure is time and the hiding place the past … the ebb tide of memory, waves of emotion such as desire, jealousy, and artistic euphoria – this is the material of this enormous and yet singularly light and translucid work’
Vladimir Nabokov

‘What soars in this new version is the simplicity of language, and fidelity to the cambers of Proust’s prose … Davis’s translation is … magnificent, precise’
Frank Wynne, Irish Times

‘Lydia Davis’s fine translation … [conveys] his rich lyricism in dignified literary English’
Robert Alter, The Times Literary Supplement