Swann’s Way

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).
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).
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