Description
A cup of tea and some fragrant cookies transport a man into the past. So begins one of the most famous literary epics ever written. His senses full of scents and flavors of his childhood, our narrator drifts back in time to muse on an old family friend, Charles Swann. Who was Swann and did the narrator truly know him? We float backwards into the narrator's youth, when Swann numbered among dinner guests of a more gracious era. The narrator opens his mind to what he knows of the past experiences of this other man—his life and love story with a woman named Odette. Du Côté de Chez Swann (Swann's Way), the first volume of Proust's masterpiece À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time), is a meditation on the nature of experience and memory, looking back to touchstones of sensory and imaginative history, using them as guideposts on a dreamy voyage through the mysteries of time and identity, self and others.
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Opening Lines (Experimental)
Marcel Proust.
I.
Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure. Parfois, à peine ma bougie éteinte, mes yeux se fermaient si vite que je navais pas le temps de me dire: «Je mendors.» Et, une demi-heure après, la pensée quil était temps de chercher le sommeil méveillait; je voulais ...
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Du Côté de Chez Swann
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Du Côté de Chez Swann
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