The Way by Swann’s is one of the great novels of childhood, depicting the impressions of a sensitive boy of his family and neighbours, brought dazzlingly back to life by the famous taste of a madeleine. It contains the separate short novel, A Love of Swann’s, a study of sexual jealousy that forms a crucial part of the vast, unfolding structure of In Search of Lost Time. This book established Proust as one of the greatest voices of the modern age – satirical, sceptical, confiding and endlessly varied in his response to the human condition.
‘A treasure hunt where the treasure is time and the hiding place the past … the ebb tide of memory, waves of emotion such as desire, jealousy, and artistic euphoria – this is the material of this enormous and yet singularly light and translucid work’
Vladimir Nabokov
‘What soars in this new version is the simplicity of language, and fidelity to the cambers of Proust’s prose … Davis’s translation is … magnificent, precise’
Frank Wynne, Irish Times
‘Lydia Davis’s fine translation … [conveys] his rich lyricism in dignified literary English’
Robert Alter, The Times Literary Supplement
