Swann's Way: Vintage Classics French Series(French Vintage Classics)

The definitive translation of a truly great French novel - Proust's beautiful, atmospheric story of memory and loss. This is the first volume of In Search of Lost Time, one of the greatest French novels of the twentieth century. Travelling back through time, the narrator tells the story of events long since past - his childhood happiness and sadness, and memories brought famously back to life by the taste of a madeleine. His family's friend and neighbour, the aristocratic Swann, weaves through the tale. We learn of Swann's passionate love affair with Odette, a jealous love that creates a model for the narrator's own relationships. All Proust's great themes begin here: time and memory, love and loss, art and the artistic vocation. THE ACCLAIMED FULLY REVISED EDITION OF THE SCOTT MONCRIEFF AND KILMARTIN TRANSLATION The best translation available: 'A really major, significant achievement, and one that you should put on your Christmas list immediately' Guardian VINTAGE FRENCH CLASSICS - six masterpieces of French fiction in collectable editions.

About the Author :
Marcel Proust (Author) Marcel Proust was born in Auteuil in 1871. In his twenties he became a conspicuous society figure, frequenting the most fashionable Paris salons of the day. After 1899, however, his suffering from chronic asthma, the death of his parents and his growing disillusionment with humanity caused him to lead an increasingly retired life. He slept by day and worked by night, writing letters and devoting himself to the completion of A la recherche du temps perdu. He died in 1922 before publication of the last three volumes of his great work. D J Enright (Translator) Born in 1920, educated at Leamington College and Downing College, Cambridge, D. J. Enright spent over twenty years teaching English at universities in Egypt, Japan, Berlin, Thailand, and Singapore. He returned to London in 1970 and later became a director of London publishers Chatto & Windus. First and foremost a poet, he published many collections in over fifty years, including Collected Poems- 1948-98 (1998), and translations from Japanese and German verse. He wrote novels for both adults and children, and revised with Madeleine Enright the English translation of Proust's In Search of Lost Time (1992), while his enormous output of non-fiction includes his Memoirs of a Mendicant Professor (1969), a number of critical works, and several anthologies, among them The Oxford Book of Death (1983) and The Faber Book of Fevers and Frets (1989). Observations on life (high and low), literature, morals and manners, human or animal, are recorded in The Way of the Cat (1992), and two companion volumes to Injury Time - Interplay- A Kind of Commonplace Book (1995) and Play Resumed- A Journal (1999). D. J. Enright received the Cholmondeley Award in 1974; he was awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry in 1981 and appointed OBE in 1991. Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature since 1961, he was made Companion of Literature by the Society in 1998, an honour granted to no more than ten living writers at any one time. He died on the last day of 2002, after battling vigorously against cancer for seven years.

Review :
My advice is to plunge straight into Volume 1, Swann's Way there are many who swear the experience has permanently enriched their lives One of the cornerstones of the Western literary canon Surely the greatest novelist of the 20th century As close to being a definitive English version of the great novel as we are likely to get Proust isn't just the most profound of novelists, but the most entertaining, too. No reader ever forgets his most killingly funny scenes... Proust sinks deepest in readers because the book is so exhaustively analytical, so ceaselessly truthful. Not the least of it is the book's heavenly length, so that it inevitably takes over your life for a long stretch... the experience of reading it becomes, in itself, an unforgettable thing