Remembrance of Things Past: Volume 1: 1/3 (Penguin Clothbound Classics) Hardcover – 24 Nov. 2016

i thought the book would have been in better condtion, it was quite sunburnt.

Awesome

Beautifully presented book

Good clean copy with a few easily-removed pencil marks. Promptly sent and arrived undamaged. Absolute bargain.

This is a beautiful book, gentle and relaxing, A pleasure to read.

I like all volumes of this epic novel. Swann's way is brilliant written. Of love and envy. The beginning of a childhood and the coming of age. A love to a prostitute. The rage of the opposite. A tremendous life filled with emoticons and the last signs of nobility. A childhood love to Gilbert. The experiences to the adulthood.

I began this huge classic in 1968 and was entranced by the opening pages. However I had the Moncrieff translation (Chatto & Windus) and I wanted to add the complete of that to my collection. In a bookshop they had quite a good deal for those (12 volumes and illustrated which adds to the appeal. And they are an attractive series. I still want those but it was just a little too much. I was tempted and I could still either get them individually or as a whole set. However the shop also had the Penguin 3 volume edition, but only Vol 2 and 3 (of course). I found these and was able to get the whole thing. I like complete sets of things and of course, while I haven't read it all, I do indeed want to read it: not simply because of it being part of Bloom's "Canon" (although one is heartened by that rather eccentric but intense critic's great enthusiasm and love for literature, and amused by his dismissal of fragmented or "postmodern" etc books, and he has some interesting ways of looking at literature, a kind of antidote say to Marjorie Perloff, whose criticism I like also for different reasons. The other interesting critic is Helen Vendler, who, like Bloom et al, is good on the more normative or mainline writers). The Penguin edition in 3 Vol published ca 1983 or so is an update so to speak of the Moncrieff translation. Moncrieff took almost as long to translate Proust as Proust to read it. It is about memory, love, and mystery. It is a modernist human comedy. Of course those who can read French tell me that is the best, but I have no doubt that a French translation of Joyce has similar limitations but can survive enough. Benjamin talks somewhere of how translation in many ways creates a new work. I'm glad to have this book and only require time to 'knock the bastard off" as Hilary said of his successful climb of Everest. But it is a book to savour and linger over, that is what I sensed in 1968 when I started reading it! Good things take time...

The greatest single novel of all time, right up there with the likes of Cervantes,dante, Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, James Joyce and other masters. Wonderful rendition looking fabulous in shelf