Swann's Way is the first volume of Marcel Proust's monumental novel In Search of Lost Time, and one of the most celebrated openings in all of literature. It begins with an unnamed narrator lying awake at night, drifting through memory, until the taste of a madeleine cake dipped in tea unlocks a flood of recollection and carries him back to the summers of his childhood in the country town of Combray.
From these involuntary memories the novel unfurls: the narrator's aching need for his mother's goodnight kiss, the eccentric relatives and neighbors of Combray, and the two "ways" of the title that come to symbolize the paths of his life. The volume's long central section, "Swann in Love," steps back before the narrator's birth to tell the story of the cultured aesthete Charles Swann and his consuming, jealous passion for the courtesan Odette de Crécy—a portrait of desire and self-deception that stands almost as a novel in itself.
Written in famously long, cascading sentences of extraordinary precision, Swann's Way is a meditation on memory, time, art, and love. Demanding but immensely rewarding, it opens one of the defining works of modern fiction.
