The second volume of In Search of Lost Time, one of the greatest
novels of the twentieth century
James Grieve's acclaimed new translation of In the Shadow of Young
Girls in Flower will introduce a new century of American readers to the
literary riches of Marcel Proust. As the second volume in the superb
edition of In Search of Lost Time--the first completely new
translation of Proust's novel since the 1920s--it brings us a more comic
and lucid prose than English readers have previously been able to enjoy.
In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower is Proust's spectacular
dissection of male and female adolescence, charged with the narrator's
memories of Paris and the Normandy seaside. At the heart of the story
lie his relationships with his grandmother and with the Swann family.
As a meditation on different forms of love, In the Shadow of Young
Girls in Flower has no equal. Here, Proust introduces some of his
greatest comic inventions, from the magnificently dull Monsieur de
Norpois to the enchanting Robert de Saint-Loup. It is memorable as well
for the first appearance of the two figures who for better or worse are
to dominate the narrator's life--the Baron de Charlus and the mysterious
Albertine.