About the Series: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. This new translation encapsulates the qualities that have secured Proust's reputation, and serves as a perfect introduction to his writing. Swann in Love is part of Proust's monumental masterpiece In Search of Lost Time, and it is also a captivating self-contained story.
His wilful self-delusion is both poignant and comic, and his tormented feelings play out in scenes of high comedy amongst Odette's socially pretentious circle. The novel traces the progress of Swann's emotions with penetrating exactitude as he encounters Odette at the regular gatherings in the salon of the Verdurins. Swann is a highly cultured man-about-town who is plunged into turmoil when he falls for a young woman called Odette de Crecy. Set against the backdrop of Paris at the end of the nineteenth century, the story of Charles Swann illuminates the fragilities and foibles of human beings when in the grip of desire. Get it delivered every Friday.Swann in Love is a brilliant, devastating novella that tells of infatuation, love, and jealousy.
The Booklist is a weekly newsletter for book lovers from books editor Jason Steger. Like the narrator himself, our reading of In Search of Lost Time – its pleasures, challenges, and rewards – will change and grow in richness across time, and perhaps this is the true genius of Marcel Proust’s fiction. Any life lessons then would likely have been lost on me. I don’t think there is a right age to read the novel. Perhaps if I had read Proust in my 20s, I might have wised up faster about jealousy and possessive love. And, having first failed in my late 20s, at times I had felt slightly ashamed ever to have made so little headway. In his memoir How to Make Gravy, Paul Kelly recalls spending large chunks of his 24th year reading In Search of Lost Time, “like a caterpillar munching a giant leaf”. So too was an episode of the Backlisted Podcast, which proposed a less reverential approach to the novel. Paintings in Proust by Eric Karpeles was an invaluable companion, revealing the frequent allusions to paintings and artists. Did I have to check the who’s who now and then? Certainly.
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