Swanns Way Marcel Proust – When the narrator of Swanns Way dips a petite madeleine into hot tea, the act transports him to his childhood in the French town of Combray. Out of his Pandoras box of reflections comes a memory of an old family friend, Swanna man who was long ago undone by romantic desire and cruel reality. In this reverie lie the insights the author seeks about his own life and ageless truths about the ephemeral nature of emotions, places, and, ultimately, love.A masterful ode to memorys power to haunt the heart and nourish the soul, this first volume of Prousts magnum opus, In Search of Lost Time, remains an unmatched accomplishment in the Western literary canon.A psychological self-portrait, a clear-eyed social study, and a profound meditation upon the artistic process, Marcel Proust’s monumental, encyclopedic masterpiece A la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time) changed the course of 20th-century literature. Swann’s Way, the first volume, introduces the novel’s major themes and its unnamed narrator, an introspective man drawn, in his youth, to fashionable society, like the author himself. Through his narrator’s consciousness, Proust offers readers a comprehensive portrait of the high society of Paris from the 1870s through the First World War.Swann’s Way begins with the narrator’s reminiscences of early childhood — including, famously, his evocative memory of eating a pastry called a madeleine — and his fascination with what seemed the separate worlds of his family’s various neighbors and acquaintances. He then turns his focus to the wealthy connoisseur Charles Swann and his obsessive relationship with the vulgar but radiant courtesan Odette, chronicling in detail the milieu in which it is enacted and its unfortunate effects on him.Du cote de chez Swann first appeared in 1913. It is a bitingly satiric, often comic evocation of French society that addresses a range of philosophical questions about perception, memory, desire, art, family, and politics. On its own or as part of a larger work, it is a rich search for a reality that transcends the passage of time.
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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.Born in the first year of the Third Republic, the young Marcel, like his narrator, was a delicate child from a bourgeois family. He was active in Parisian high society during the 80s and 90s, welcomed in the most fashionable and exclusive salons of his day. However, his position there was also one of an outsider, due to his Jewishness and homosexuality. Towards the end of 1890s Proust began to withdraw more and more from society, and although he was never entirely reclusive, as is sometimes made out, he lapsed more completely into his lifelong tendency to sleep during the day and work at night. He was also plagued with severe asthma, which had troubled him intermittently since childhood, and a terror of his own death, especially in case it should come before his novel had been completed. The first volume, after some difficulty finding a publisher, came out in 1913, and Proust continued to work with an almost inhuman dedication on his masterpiece right up until his death in 1922, at the age of 51.
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