Swann's Way

Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time is one of the most entertaining reading experiences in any language and arguably the finest single work of the twentieth century. Since the original prewar translation there has been no completely new rendering of the original French. Now Viking makes Proust's masterpiece accessible to a whole new generation, beginning with Lydia Davis's new 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 famous taste of a madeleine. It also enfolds the short novel Swann's Love, an incomparable study of sexual jealousy, which becomes a crucial part of the vast, unfolding structure of In Search of Lost Time. The first volume of the book 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 re-created through memory.