Synopses & Reviews
The first and best known volume of one of the landmarks of world literature. Available separately for those who want to approach Proust carefully!
Review
"The whole is a treasure hunt where the treasure is time and the hiding place the past....The transmutation of sensation into sentiment, the ebb and tide of memory, waves of emotions such as desire, jealousy, and artistic euphoria this is the material of the enormous and yet singularly light and translucid work....Within the novel the narrator Marcel contemplates, in the last volume, the ideal novel he will write. Proust's work is only a copy of that ideal novel but what a copy!" Vladimir Nabokov
Review
"Proust is reliably lucid and almost invariably kind....The almost hypnotic effect of Proust is to...demonstrate that an apparently self-absorbed individual may yet draw his strength and his insight from a passionate engagement with the interior and exterior lives of others, as well as his own. On him not much was lost." Christopher Hitchens, The Atlantic Monthly (read the entire Atlantic Monthly review)
Synopsis
With an Introduction by Richard Howard and revisions by D.J. Knight, the definitive translation of the first part of Marcel Proust's legendary seven-part cycle is now in mass-market paperback.
About the Author
Marcel Proust was born in Auteuil in 1871. When he died in 1922, the last three volumes of his masterpiece remained to be published. He has recently been the subject of two new books: How Proust Can Change Your Life by Alain de Botton and The Year of Reading Proust by Phyllis Rose.