Swann's Way

The narrator dips a small cake called a madeleine into a cup of tea, and the taste suddenly brings back the whole world of his childhood summers in the village of Combray: his mother's goodnight kiss, his aunt's room, the church steeple, the two walks his family took. The middle section, 'Swann in Love', goes back in time to tell how the elegant Charles Swann fell into a jealous passion for Odette.

Swann's Way, published in 1913 at Proust's own expense after publishers refused it, is the first volume of In Search of Lost Time, one of the longest and most influential novels ever written. This is the classic English translation by C. K. Scott Moncrieff. Proust's long sentences reward patience: read slowly and let them carry you.

Marcel Proust (1871–1922) was born in Paris to a wealthy family, suffered from asthma from childhood and spent his youth in the fashionable salons of Paris society, which he later described with ironic precision. He supported Dreyfus, wrote essays and translated John Ruskin.

After his parents' deaths he withdrew to a cork-lined bedroom and worked through the nights on In Search of Lost Time. Publishers rejected the first volume, Swann's Way, and he paid to publish it in 1913; the second volume won the Goncourt Prize in 1919. He died before the last volumes were published.