A man lies awake remembering. Then, decades later, he tastes a madeleine dipped in tea and the whole vanished world of his childhood at Combray rises up complete-the garden, the church steeple, the two walks, the agony of waiting for his mother's goodnight kiss. It is the most famous passage in modern literature, and it is only the beginning.
Swann's Way is the first volume of In Search of Lost Time, and it contains within it a second, self-contained masterpiece: Swann in Love, the story of a cultivated man of the world destroyed by jealousy over a woman he does not even admire. Proust dissects that obsession with a precision that has never been matched-the surveillance, the self-deception, the way desire feeds on doubt.
Published in 1913 after being rejected by the major houses, it invented a way of writing about memory, time and social life that the century then spent absorbing. The sentences are long because thought is long; read aloud, their architecture becomes audible in a way the page can hide. This is an unabridged recording of a fresh modern translation, and the first volume of the complete work.
