Swann's Way

by Proust, Marcel; Grieve, James

• ISBN13: 9781681376295
• ISBN10: 1681376296
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2023-05-23
• Publisher: NYRB Classics

Summary

Now available for the first time in the United States, a celebrated translation of the first volume of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time.

Swann's Way, the first of the seven volumes that constitute Marcel Proust's lifework, In Search of Lost Time, introduces the larger themes of the whole sequence while standing on its own as a brilliant evocation of the French Belle Époque.

Here we encounter Proust's narrator, restless and unfulfilled in middle age, his life weighing on him as a burden of things forgotten and things undone, until quite by chance he is brought to remember the world of his childhood, his clinging attachment to his mother, his dread of his father, summers in the country and the two walks his family regularly took, one by a great aristocratic estate, the other by the house of a certain Charles Swann, to whom a mystery was attached. A child's world and the world of adults the child can only begin to imagine unfurl before us, and Proust's pages spill over with incident and puzzlement, pathos and humor.

The novel then takes a further step into the past to tell of the goings-on at the Parisian salon of the bourgeois Verdurins, where social climbing and artistic accomplishment exist in incongruous and comic conjunction, and of Swann's infatuation with the courtesan Odette. Swann, man about town and familiar of royalty, is soon reduced to walking after midnight, unrecognizable to himself and to his friends, forlorn as a child awaiting a goodnight kiss, no thought in his head but love—and in Proust's universe there is no more terrible affliction.

James Grieve began his career as a translator of Proust in the early 1970s, driven by his dismay at how many readers deemed In Search of Lost Time to be too difficult for them to take on. Grieve's artful and celebrated version of Swann's Way—only now available outside his native Australia—shows that this is hardly the case. Proust's great narrative covers the whole gamut of human experiences and emotions, but to read it is to know joy.

Author Biography

Marcel Proust (1871–1922) was a French novelist, critic, and essayist. Born in Auteuil, Paris, Proust began his literary career writing criticism and short stories for Le Banquet, La Revue Blanche, and Le Figaro. At 38 years old, Proust began gathering material for what would become his monumental epic, In Search of Lost time, which he would work on for the rest of his life. Published in seven volumes between 1913 and 1927, the second volume won the Prix Goncourt, France's most prestigious literary prize. The monumental epic tracks economic and cultural change taking place in France at the end of the Third Republic; its play with the themes of memory and time earned him a reputation as one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century. 
  
James Grieve (1934–2020) was an Australian translator and author.  Best known for his translations of Proust, Grieve also translated two children's books, wrote book reviews for The Canberra Times, and taught French language and literature at the Australian National University in Canberra.