Swann’s Way-Fast Shipping

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Now available for the first time in the United States, a celebrated translation of the first volume of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time.

Swann’s Way, the first of the seven volumes that con­stitute Marcel Proust’s lifework, In Search of Lost Time,introduces the larger themes of the whole work while standing on itsown as a brilliant evocation of childhood, hopeless love, and the FrenchBelle Époque.

We first encounter Proust’s narrator in middle age,consumed with regret for his misspent life. Suddenly, he is back in thepast, seized by memories of childhood: his clinging attachment to hismother, his dread of his father, summers in the country and the twowalks his family was in the habit of taking—one by an aristocraticestate, the other by the house of a certain Charles Swann, to whom amystery was attached. A child’s world, and the world of adults the childstruggles to imagine, spread out before us, while Proust’s pages teemwith incident and puzzle­ment, pathos and humor.

The novel thentakes a further step backwards to tell the story of Swann’s infatuationwith the courtesan Odette. Swann, man­-about­-town and familiar ofroyalty, is reduced to walking after midnight, forlorn as a childawaiting a good­night kiss.

James Grieve began his careertranslating Proust in the early 1970s, driven by his dismay at how manyreaders recoiled from what they imagined to be the difficulty ofProust’s work, and his translation of Swann’s Way brings outthe book’s fluency and speed as no other version does. It offers anunequaled introduction to an incompa­rably absorbing work of art.