As they hop from party to party and “faire Cattleya” (their own lovers’ talk for getting it on) Swann experiences the elated highs and devastating lows of love, symbolised by a beautiful phrase of music he hears at a soiree one evening. Then the novel switches, to a long section about Monsieur Swan and his affairs with Odette de Crecy in Paris. He wiles away his time exploring the countryside, including the two path’s to a nearby town, one of which they call Swann’s Way because it passes by one of his properties, where the young narrator sees and falls in love with Swann’s daughter Gilberte. His family hosts dinner parties, including with a certain Monsieur Swann, with whom they eventually have a falling out. Here he fears above all going to bed without the kiss of his mother. From this waking (in Paris it at length becomes clearer) his minds casts back to other beds and bedrooms, particularly in rural Combray, where he would holiday as a child with his family.

The narrator – who is never named – awakening finds that “I could not be sure at first who I was … such as may lurk and flicker in the depths of an animal’s unconsciousness” (I’d love to read his thoughts on jet lag). Swann’s Way, the first book of Proust’s In Search Of Lost Time, opens in a sleepy haze. However sentences, phrases, clauses (bracketed thoughts – and dashed interruptions) proliferate to create labyrinthine, exhausting paragraphs. There are a lot of characters, but not so many that they are impossible to keep track of. The settings and descriptive passages are clear. The thing is, Proust’s prose is not that difficult. Reading an ebook, the percentages ticked by oh-so-slowly. I could read it only in bite-sized chunks, pushing on until I finished a paragraph or two. Lucky I was reading but a seventh of Proust’s modern monstrosity. Well, it only took me nearly three months.

Swann's way book