Swann's Way

First published in 1913, Swann’s Way opens Marcel Proust’s vast novel In Search of Lost Time, inviting the reader into a world where memory, desire and the passage of time shape the texture of everyday life. The narrator’s childhood in the provincial town of Combray returns through fragments of family life, familiar landscapes and the rituals of his aunt Léonie, before the narrative turns to the obsessive love affair between Charles Swann and Odette de Crécy. Moving between childhood recollection and the intricate social world of Parisian society, Proust explores how experience is transformed by memory and how love can become entangled with jealousy, illusion and self-deception.

Revolutionary in its treatment of consciousness and time, the novel replaces conventional plot with the unfolding movements of thought, sensation and recollection. Its celebrated opening meditation on sleep and its evocation of the madeleine have become defining moments in modern literature, while Proust’s finely observed social comedy reveals the vanities and hierarchies of the world he inhabited. Both an intimate portrait of a vanished society and the beginning of one of the twentieth century’s great literary achievements, Swann’s Way establishes the themes and sensibility of Proust’s extraordinary cycle.

From the book

“The places we have known do not belong only to the world of space in which we situate them for our greater convenience.”

— Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way

On Swann’s Way

“For several days I have not put down your book; I am supersaturating myself in it, rapturously, wallowing in it.”

— André Gide, letter to Marcel Proust (1913)