The Guermantes Way

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Marcel Proust

Penguin Classics, London, 2005, English; originally published 1920 in French

Fiction

ISBN: 9780141180335

From the Publisher. After the relative intimacy of the first two volumes of In Search of Lost Time, The Guermantes Way opens up a vast, dazzling landscape of fashionable Parisian life in the late 19th century, as the narrator enters the brilliant, shallow world of the literary and aristocratic salons. Both a salute to and a devastating satire of a time, place, and culture, The Guermantes Way defines the great tradition of novels that follow the initiation of a young man into the ways of the world.

Also see In Search of Lost Time and Remembrance of Things Past.

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André Leon Talley

On André Leon Talley’s Book List

This is my favorite Proust volume. I can’t say that all of A La Recherche du temps perdu speaks to me, but The Guermantes Way does. I am not going to be pretentious and tell you I read Proust in French. I try, but I always have an English translation at the ready.

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