Generally agreed to be the greatest novel of the twentieth century and possibly any other Prousts masterpiece is here presented in the latest revision to the classic Scott Moncrieff translation. On the surface a traditional Bildungsroman describing the narrators journey of self-discovery, this huge and complex book is also a panoramic and richly comic portrait of France in the authors lifetime, and a profound meditation on the nature of art, love, time, memory and death. But for most readers it is the characters of the novel who loom the largest: Swann and Odette, Monsieur de Charlus, Morel, the Duchesse de Guermantes, Françoise, Saint-Loup and so many others Giants, as the author calls them, immersed in Time.
