Synopsis
This self-contained opening volume of Proust's seven-volume masterpiece REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS PAST introduces the important themes of the novel: childhood, memory, love both idealized and unrequited, and the narrator's fascination with society and the aristocracy. The narrator's childhood memories include the famous madeleine scene, and the destructive love affair between Swann and Odette. The musician Vinteuil's evocative "little phrase" is also introduced in this volume, which also describes Marcel's awareness of "the two ways," the paths that intersect the village of Combray where he lives: the Guermantes Way, leading to the house of an aristocratic family, and Swann's Way, leading to the less exalted, more "literary" home of Swann, who is a family friend.
| Details | | Publication Date: | 1982-09-01 |
| Size | | Height: | 8.0 in | | Width: | 5.5 in | | Thickness: | 1.5 in | | Weight: | 33.6 oz |
Publisher's Note
One of the great works of Western literature, now in the new definitive French Pleiade edition translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin. Volume one includes Swann's Way and Within a Budding Grove.
Industry Reviews
"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!"
"Lectures on Literature" - Vladimir Nabokov (01/01/1980)
"Tedious he is, but his tediousness becomes excusable once its cause is perceived. Proust tries our patience so long as we expect his story to move forward: that not being the direction in which it is intended to move....The movement is as that of an expanding flower or insect....Proust does not get forward, we complain. Why should he? Is there no other line of development in the universe?"
"Proust" - Clive Bell (01/01/1928)
"[Proust has] a tendency to fill in and stretch out a sentence to its utmost breadth and length, to cram into the stocking of the sentence a miraculous number of clauses, parenthetic phrases, subordinate clauses, sub-subordinate clauses. Indeed, in verbal generosity he is a veritable Santa."
"Lectures on Literature" - Vladimir Nabokov (01/01/1980)
"To his natural gift of a vision as remarkable for breadth as for acuteness M. Proust has added the refinements of an extensive culture....He is a creator of great literature, a master of uncommon style, with a profound knowledge of the human heart and head."
New York Times - Joseph Collins (11/26/1922)
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