Swann's Way

We begin in a child's bedroom, where the narrator lies awake and his memory begins its mysterious work. Through sensory triggers, the taste of a madeleine dipped in tea, the uneven stones of a courtyard, he is suddenly flooded with the lost world of his childhood in Combray. But the novel's heart belongs to Charles Swann: a sophisticated, worldly man trapped in a consuming obsession with Odette de Crécy, a woman of easy virtue he desperately wants to make his own. What follows is a devastating portrait of jealousy, desire, and the blindness of love, set against the glittering, treacherous world of Parisian aristocracy. Proust demonstrates that memory is not voluntary, we cannot simply decide to remember. The past returns unbidden, through taste and smell and sensation, and transforms a simple cake into the key that unlocks an entire buried life. This is a novel about the elusiveness of happiness, the cruelty of desire, the slow theft of time, and the strange salvation art might offer.