Product Description

The transmutation of sensation into sentiment, 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


In the overture to Swann's Way, the themes of the whole of In Search of Lost Time are introduced, and the narrator's childhood in Paris and Combray is recalled, most  memorably in the evocation of the famous maternal good-night kiss. The  recollection of the narrator's love for Swann's daughter Gilberte leads to an account  of Swann's passion for Odette and the rise of the nouveaux riches Verdurins.

The final volume of a new, definitive text of A la recherche du temps perdu was published by the Bibliotheque de la Pleiade in 1989. For this authoritative English-language edition, D. J. Enright has revised the late Terence Kilmartin's acclaimed reworking of C. K. Scott Moncrieff's translation to take into account the new French editions.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #89330 in Books
• Published on: 1992-09-05
• Released on: 1992-09-05
• Original language: French
• Dimensions: 1.23 pounds
• Binding: Hardcover
• 640 pages

From AudioFile
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 © AudioFile 2001, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine

The Boston Globe, January 1999
"For classic literature, check out the new "Cover to Cover" series. All are 19th and 20th century works produced in England. They are handsomely packaged in sturdy, decorative cardboard boxes. The series carries the exclusive Royal Warrant from Charles, Prince of Wales."

Sunday Telegraph
"Cover to Cover's unabridged readings of classic novels are in a class of their own."