The Guermantes Way

’the social kaleidoscope was shifting’

The Guermantes Way, the third volume of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, provides a transition from the realm of adolescence into the adult social world of Belle Epoque Paris. Its pages buzz with worldly conversations, with bravado and posturing, infatuation, scandal, prejudice, and intrigue. To the fore is Proust’s ear for spoken language and how it provides a stage for human foibles as well as inventiveness and panache. This is a broad canvas studded with amusing anecdotes, surprising vignettes and touching scenes, as well as fascinating characters including the indomitable Duchesse de Guermantes and her enigmatic relation the Baron de Charlus. The Guermantes Way immerses readers into a society in flux, as the old aristocracy cedes to a wealthy, rising bourgeoisie and everyone, regardless of class or standing, must navigate the perilous waters of the Dreyfus Affair. Through these lenses, Proust explores questions of substance and superficiality, and identity and belonging, in highly memorable scenes concerning friendship, love, mortality, and loss.

The novel is an extraordinary chronicle of pre-war Paris as well as a vital stepping stone in Proust’s novel, building on the formative, partially learned lessons of the second volume, In the Shadow of Girls in Blossom, and preparing the ground for the portentous challenges of the volumes that lie ahead.

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Marcel Proust, Adam Watt, Peter Bush

Peter Bush is an award-winning translator who has translated nearly one hundred books from Spanish, Catalan, and French. He is a former Director of the British Centre for Literary Translation where he founded the Literary Translation Summer School.

Peter Brooks is Sterling Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature at Yale University. He has published on narrative, psychoanalysis, law, largely in nineteenth and twentieth literature. He is the author of numerous books, including Henry James Goes to Paris (2007), Flaubert in the Ruins of Paris (2017), and, most recently, Seduced by Story: The Use and Abuse of Narrative (2022).

Adam Watt is Professor of French & Comparative Literature at the University of Exeter, where he is Deputy Pro-Vice-Chancellor of the Faculty of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences. His books include Reading in Proust’s A la recherche: Le Délire de la lecture (2009); The Cambridge Introduction to Marcel Proust (2011); a critical biography of Proust (2013); and, as editor, Marcel Proust in Context (2013) and The Cambridge History of the Novel in French (2021). He has published comparative work on Proust and a range of writers from Valéry, Rivière, Beckett, and Barthes to Eve Kosofsky-Sedgwick and Anne Carson.