Publisher Description
The celebrated first volume of the novel that "brilliantly explores the workings of time and memory against the backdrop of Belle Époque France" (The New Criterion).
One the greatest novels of the twentieth century, In Search of Lost Time begins with Swann's Way, a young man's evocative journey of perception and remembrance, "which meanders from the nameless narrator's recollections of his Combray childhood to a time before his birth, when Swann was in love with Odette, and back again as the narrator meditates on the power of names over the imagination and recalls falling in love with Gilberte, Swann and Odette's daughter" (Los Angeles Times).
"A masterpiece . . . Even when I've felt myself hopelessly drifting in my little boat, I've felt the lulling beauty of Proust's writing. This is a man who can make a multi-page description of a Hawthorn blossom fascinating—and then do it again, and again, and again. What's more, when you actually focus, pick up those oars and start powering through those dense waters, you realize just how much is going on beneath the surface. What insights. What subtle ironies. What teasing jokes. What sensual pleasures. What feats of memory and description. What loving characterizations. And what devastating character assassinations. You realize, in short, that this is the stuff." —The Guardian
"Even those who have not read the novels are aware of the journey of memory on which the narrator goes when he tastes a madeleine dipped in tea; it has become 'the Proustian moment.'" —The Telegraph
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Relax: it's fantastic. There's no question that Davis's American English is thinner and more literal than C.K. Scott Montcrieff's archaically inflected turns of phrase and idioms, at least as revised by Terence Kilmartin and later by D.J. Enright. The removal of some of the familiar layers of the past in this all-new translation gives one a feeling similar to that of encountering an old master painting that has just been cleaned: the colors seem sharper and momentarily disorienting. Yet many readers will find it exhilarating, allowing the text to shed slight airs that were not quite Proust's and making many of the jokes much more immediate (as when he implies that sense-organ atrophy in the bourgeois is a defense mechanism and the result of hardening unarticulated feelings). As accomplished translator and novelist Davis (The End of the Story) notes in her foreword, she has followed Proust's sentence structure as closely as possible "in its every aspect," including punctuation, word order and word choice. To take just one case, where Montcrieff/Kilmartin describe Mlle. Vinteuil finding it pleasant to metaphorically "sojourn" in sadism, Davis has the much more definitive "emigrate." Proust's psychological inquiry generally feels much sharper, giving a much more palpable sense of Freud and Bergson and of the young Marcel's willful (if not malefic) manipulations of those around him. For first-timers who don't have French and are allergic to the slightest whiff of euphemism, this is the best means for traveling the way by Swann's. BOMC, Reader's Subscription and Insightout Book Club; 4-city translator tour.
