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Title details for Swann's Way by Marcel Proust - Wait list

Swann's Way

by Marcel Proust
Expatriate
Audiobook
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"The thirst for something other than what we have—to bring something new, even if it is worse, some emotion, some sorrow; when our sensibility, which happiness has silenced like an idle harp, wants to resonate under some hand, even a rough one, and even if it might be broken by it." –Marcel Proust, Swann's Way

Graham Greene called Proust the "greatest novelist of the 20th century," and W. Somerset Maugham called this novel the "greatest fiction to date." Proust died before he was able to complete his revision of the drafts and proofs of the final volumes, the last three of which were published posthumously. Proust explores the themes of time, space and memory but the novel is above all an example of innumerable literary, structural, stylistic and thematic possibilities. A monumental French masterpiece of world literature.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    March 10, 2017

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9781518941801
      • File size: 538215 KB
      • Duration: 18:41:16

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • AudioFile Magazine
      Reading Proust's great work, REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS PAST, may be daunting, but listening--at least to the first part of the seven-section novel (albeit abridged) -- is a riveting experience, an insightful, often funny, poetical exploration of character, place, emotion and idea. In SWANN'S WAY, the young narrator recalls the elaborate social etiquette and conventions among Combray's first families. Neville Jason is a master at characterizing the multitude of voices and guides us seamlessly through time. After such a short, yet exquisite, sampling of this classic, we are tantalized and long to continue. J.H.L. (c)AudioFile, Portland, Maine
    • AudioFile Magazine
      Because SWANN'S WAY, the first volume of REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS PAST, is the author's reflection on events decades-old and highly revered, John Rowe's soft-spoken, even-toned narration seems right. Rowe gives equal weight to the minute and the profound. In that, he shows an appreciation of Proust's genius at discovering universal human truths by tirelessly dissecting the overlying details, in this case, details of nineteenth-century French society. Rowe pronounces the many French family and place names seamlessly, placing no obstacle in the way of the listener, who would be lulled into thinking she's hearing Proust himself tell his story. T.F. (c) AudioFile 2000, Portland, Maine
    • AudioFile Magazine
      Before I listened to this magnificent performance, I groaned at the prospect of having to sit through more than twenty hours of Proust on tape. (And this program represents only half the complete novel.) The highly abstract, paragraph-long sentences! The apparently disconnected flashes of memory and perception that send us careening backward and forward in time! If ever a book demanded to be read and not heard, I thought, surely it was this one. I was wrong. Recorded Books has selected a narrator who makes Proust light-going, if that's imaginable. George Guidall draws us into the banter and gossip of the provincial French bourgeoisie; he makes us feel as if we were at the table with Marcel's family or sharing the parlor with Monsieur Swann's coterie. More impressive still is the ease with which he handles even the most difficult exposition. Try, for instance, Guidall's rendition of "Combray," a complex meditation on Marcel's childhood at his family's country home. What might have been sleep-inducing becomes a haunting, even mesmerizing, experience--the mark of a virtuoso audiobook narrator. J.M. Winner of AUDIOFILE Earphones Award (c) AudioFile 2001, Portland, Maine
    • Publisher's Weekly

      Starred review from July 14, 2003
      Relax: it's fantastic. There's no question that Davis's American English is thinner and more literal than C.K. Scott Montcrieff's archaically inflected turns of phrase and idioms, at least as revised by Terence Kilmartin and later by D.J. Enright. The removal of some of the familiar layers of the past in this all-new translation gives one a feeling similar to that of encountering an old master painting that has just been cleaned: the colors seem sharper and momentarily disorienting. Yet many readers will find it exhilarating, allowing the text to shed slight airs that were not quite Proust's and making many of the jokes much more immediate (as when he implies that sense-organ atrophy in the bourgeois is a defense mechanism and the result of hardening unarticulated feelings). As accomplished translator and novelist Davis (The End of the Story) notes in her foreword, she has followed Proust's sentence structure as closely as possible "in its every aspect," including punctuation, word order and word choice. To take just one case, where Montcrieff/Kilmartin describe Mlle. Vinteuil finding it pleasant to metaphorically "sojourn" in sadism, Davis has the much more definitive "emigrate." Proust's psychological inquiry generally feels much sharper, giving a much more palpable sense of Freud and Bergson—and of the young Marcel's willful (if not malefic) manipulations of those around him. For first-timers who don't have French and are allergic to the slightest whiff of euphemism, this is the best means for traveling the way by Swann's. BOMC, Reader's Subscription and Insightout Book Club; 4-city translator tour. (Sept. 15)Forecast:Look for a fall blitz of Proustiana, reviving everything from the Montcrieff to Alain de Bouton's
      How Proust Can Change Your Life. Copyright restrictions will keep the last three of the six planned volumes out of American editions until 2019, 2020 and 2022, respectively, but devoted readers will seek them out via British booksellers—and have probably already begun to do so, since they were published there last year.

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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