From Publishers Weekly
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.Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.


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."


Deirdre Donahue, USA TODAY, December 3, 1998
"These Cover to Cover tapes offer up a delectable feast for fans of the spoken word. We're talking class act here - from the elegant covers to the accomplished readers."


Review
?Reading Swann?s Way was a rapturous experience.??David Denby


Book Description
Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time is one of the most entertaining reading experiences in any language and arguably the finest single work of the twentieth century. Since the original prewar translation there has been no completely new rendering of the original French. Now Viking makes Proust's masterpiece accessible to a whole new generation, beginning with Lydia Davis's new translation of the first volume, Swann's Way. Swann's Way is one of the preeminent novels of childhood-a sensitive boy's impressions of his family and neighbors, all brought dazzlingly back to life years later by the famous taste of a madeleine. It also enfolds the short novel Swann's Love, an incomparable study of sexual jealousy, which becomes a crucial part of the vast, unfolding structure of In Search of Lost Time. The first volume of the book that established Proust as one of the finest voices of the modern age-satirical, skeptical, confiding, and endlessly varied in his response to the human condition-Swann's Way also stands on its own as a perfect rendering of a life in art, of the past re-created through memory.


Language Notes
Text: English (translation)
Original Language: French


Download Description
Swann's Way, the first part of A la recherche de temps perdu, Marcel Proust's seven-part cycle, was published in 1913. In it, Proust introduces the themes that run through the entire work. The narrator recalls his childhood, aided by the famous madeleine; and describes M. Swann's passion for Odette. The work is incomparable. Edmund Wilson said "[Proust] has supplied for the first time in literature an equivalent in the full scale for the new theory of modern physics."

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time is one of the most entertaining reading experiences in any language and arguably the finest novel of the twentieth century. But since its original prewar translation there has been no completely new version in English. Now, Viking brings Proust's masterpiece to new audiences throughout the world, beginning with Lydia Davis's internationally acclaimed translation of the first volume, Swann's Way.

Swann's Way is one of the preeminent novels of childhood - a sensitive boy's impressions of his family and neighbors, all brought dazzlingly back to life years later by the famous taste of a madeleine. It also enfolds the short novel "Swann in Love," an incomparable study of sexual jealousy that becomes a crucial part of the vast, unfolding structure of In Search of Lost Time. The first volume of the work that established Proust as one of the finest voices of the modern age - satirical, skeptical, confiding, and endlessly varied in his response to the human condition - Swann's Way also stands on its own as a perfect rendering of a life in art, of the past recreated through memory.

SYNOPSIS

'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.

FROM THE CRITICS

The Village Voice

As you read Davis's Swann's Way, an entirely new Proust seems to hover behind the page, a Proust who liked commas as much as semicolons, and plain words more than fancy ones -- a fussy, tired, neurotic Proust, driven by the desire to get it right.

Publishers Weekly

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. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

"For a long time, I went to bed early" in order to enjoy the manifold pleasures of reading Davis's excellent new translation of Swann's Way. In October 2002, Penguin's "Modern Classics" series published a complete new translation of In Search of Lost Time/A la recherche du temps perdu in Britain to mainly favorable reviews. (The seven-year project required seven translators, one for each volume. The next three are forthcoming here; the final three cannot be released until 2019 owing to copyright restrictions.) Viking's American edition includes minor changes in punctuation and spelling; non-English quotations are translated in the main text, with the version originale relegated to the unobtrusive, and generally helpful, endnotes. Most important, the Viking edition is based on the massive scholarship of the Pleiade edition released by Gallimard in 1987. Published in 1913, Du cut de chez Swann was first translated into English in 1922-the annus mirabilis of High Modernism. C.K. Scott Moncrieff's justly famous rendering was hailed as a literary landmark but contained many misreadings, grammatical mistakes, superfluous embellishments, and Anglicisms (not to mention polite Edwardian euphemisms for the naughty bits). Most notably, Moncrieff's series title, Remembrance of Things Past, was borrowed from Shakespeare's Sonnet 30, thereby losing the nuance of the original phrasing. These infidelities were revised by Terrence Kilmartin in the Random House 1981 edition and again by D.J. Enright in 1992. Davis has published four novels and many well-received translations and is especially noted for her translations of Maurice Blanchot. In her introduction to this new rendering of Swann's Way, she states that she has "attempted to stay as close to Proust's own style as possible, in its every aspect, without straying into an English that's too foreign or awkward." Given the utter originality and delectable complexity of Proust's labyrinthian prose, the task of the translator is especially arduous. Davis's choices with respect to diction, syntax, phrasing, and punctuation (was Proust really too stingy with commas?) are largely successful in giving us a more direct and accessible English version of the plenitude of acute psychological, sociological, and philosophical insights one garners by reading Proust's masterwork: "our social personality is a creation of the minds of others." Will the Viking edition in the fullness of time replace Moncrieff's? Those who might cleave to what was for 80 years the "standard translation" might consider that translations, like memories, "are as fleeting, alas, as the years." Enthusiastically recommended for all libraries. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 5/15/03.]-Mark Andr Singer, Mechanics' Inst. Lib., San Francisco Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING

It is marvelously about life. It reminds me of Dickens, Shakespeare, Moliere. Proust was, among other things, one of the great comic writers of all time. — Terence Kilmartin

There has never been anyone else of Proust's ability to show us things; Proust's pointing finger is unequaled. — Walter Benjamin

Reading Swann's Way was a raptorous experience. — Jonathan Lyons