Swann's Way

Marcel Proust

maj 2012 · Courier Corporation

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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 recherché 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 côté 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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Proust is one of the seminal figures in modern literature, matched only in stature by Joyce, Woolf, Mann and Kafka. By the last decade of the 19th century, the charming and ambitious Proust, born into a wealthy bourgeois family, was already a famous Paris socialite who attended the most fashionable salons of the day. The death of his parents in the early years of the 20th century, coupled with his own increasingly ill health, made of Proust a recluse who confined himself to his cork-lined bedroom on the Boulevard Haussmann. There he concentrated on the composition of his great masterpiece, Remembrance of Things Past (1913-27). In recent years, it was discovered that he had already prepared a first draft of the work in the 1890s in Jean Santeuil, which was only published posthumously in 1952. Remembrance of Things Past resists summary. Seeming at turns to be fiction, autobiography, and essay, Remembrance is a vast meditation on the relationship between time, memory, and art. In it the narrator, who bears the same first name as the author, attempts to reconstruct his life from early childhood to middle age. In the process, he surveys French society at the turn of the century and describes the eventual decline of the aristocracy in the face of the rising middle class. The process of reconstruction of Marcel's past life is made possible by the psychological device of involuntary memory; according to this theory, all of our past lies hidden within us only to be rediscovered and brought to the surface by some unexpected sense perception. In the final volume of the work, the narrator, who has succeeded in recapturing his past, resolves to preserve it through the Work of Art, his novel. He died of pneumonia and a pulmonary abscess in 1922. He was buried in the Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.