The German Side

The first volume of the most famous French novel of the twentieth century was published more than a hundred years ago, in November 1913. The novel was titled “Swann’s Way,” and its author, Marcel Proust, did not yet suspect that his creation would grow into the “In Search of Lost Time” cycle, which the writer would work on until the final hours of his life. “The Guermantes Way” is the third volume of Marcel Proust’s seven-volume novel. If the first book, “Swann’s Way,” tells of the main character’s childhood and of what came before his birth, and the second, “Within a Budding Grove,” is about his adolescence, the failure of his first love, and the birth of a new one, then “The Guermantes Way” is about youth. The narrator, captivated from early childhood by the poetry of names, finally grasps the difference between a person’s name and the person themselves, between the name of a city and the city itself. He enters the mysterious circle that has long beckoned him—in other words, he enters the society of the hereditary aristocracy—and as if by magic acquires the gift of double vision: the ability to see ordinary people—not lacking in merit, but lacking in mystery and sometimes quite amusing—without losing touch with the mysterious, beautiful, ancient, and life-giving poetry hidden in their names. The reader will have the opportunity to appreciate Elena Bayevskaya’s brilliant translation, which dispels the long-held misconception that Proust is a venerable, intellectual, but dull author.