Swann's Way

The famous opening of Swann's Way finds a grown man unable to sleep, his mind tumbling through memories of childhood until a crumb of madeleine cake dipped in tea suddenly unlocks an entire lost world. This is involuntary memory, and it will redefine everything we thought we knew about how the past lives in us. The narrative circles between the narrator's present restlessness and vivid recollections of his childhood in Combray, his desperate longing for his mother's goodnight kiss, and the central 'Swann in Love' narrative: a precise, devastating study of obsession and jealousy as Charles Swann pursues the enigmatic Odette through the parlors of Parisian high society. Proust builds an argument that what we call reality is constructed as much by memory as by present experience, and that the moments we think are gone remain within us, waiting to be triggered by a taste, a scent, a fragment of music.