In Search of Lost Time v.3

In The Guermantes Way Proust crowds a variety of exotic social creatures into his fictional menagerie. The narrator's family have installed themselves in an apartment adjoining the Paris residence in the Guermantes, and from this middle-class lookout post he is able to survey the ceremonies, the eccentricities and the ancestral feuds of the aristocracy. This is the story of a youthful infatuation with superior people told by the scathing critic of human vanity that the youth concerned has now become. Proust listensto other people, records their mannerisms, dances to the tune of their obsessions, mimics them as their language veers towards delirium, yet at the same time envelops them in his own singular narrative voice - one of the most memorable voices to be found anywhere in European literature. This fully revised translation of the definitive text has incorporated significant new material. As a result, Proust's masterpiece emerges with renewed freshness and authority. Each volume contains notes, addenda and a synopsis.