Swann's Way

Both a psychological self-portrait and a profound meditation upon the artistic process, Proust's seven-part masterpiece In Search of Lost Time changed the course of 20th-century literature. Swann's Way, the first volume, introduces the novel's major themes and the narrator, a sensitive man drawn in his youth to fashionable society. Its focus then shifts to Charles Swann, a wealthy connoisseur who moves in high-society circles in nineteenth-century Paris and a victim of an agonizing romance....