**The first volume of one of the greatest novels of the twentieth
century, in Lydia Davis's award-winning translation
**
Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time is one of the most entertaining
reading experiences in any language and arguably the finest novel of the
twentieth century. But since its original prewar translation there has
been no completely new version in English. Now, Penguin Classics brings
Proust's masterpiece to new audiences throughout the world, beginning
with Lydia Davis's internationally acclaimed translation of the first
volume, Swann's Way.
Swann's Way is one of the preeminent novels of childhood: a sensitive
boy's impressions of his family and neighbors, all brought dazzlingly
back to life years later by the taste of a madeleine. It also enfolds
the short novel "Swann in Love," an incomparable study of sexual
jealousy that becomes a crucial part of the vast, unfolding structure of
In Search of Lost Time. The first volume of the work that established
Proust as one of the finest voices of the modern age--satirical,
skeptical, confiding, and endlessly varied in his response to the human
condition--Swann's Way also stands on its own as a perfect rendering
of a life in art, of the past recreated through memory.