His crush on Gilberte would allow the narrator to develop his theory of love, which he would refer back to in the later volumes. This volume follows the narrator’s naïve love for Gilberte Swann, the daughter of a friend of his family, as well as his vacation in the (fictional) beach resort of Balbec in Normandy.

The second installment of the Recherche was awarded the Prix Goncourt in 1919, immediately pleasing critics. In The Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleur).Without further ado, here is the ranking by most to least enjoyable: Therefore, perhaps I recall most pleasantly the volumes I read while I was feeling better. Proust would probably remind me, as he often does throughout the novel, that while I read his novel I was also adding my feelings and experiences to the experience. The following is a ranking of each of the seven volumes that compose this work - ranked not by their literary merit or historical significance, but rather by how much I personally enjoyed them. Nonetheless, I still learned a lot from perusing its pages. Reading this work was an emotional rollercoaster: while it is true it is filled with passion and philosophy, a few sections are mere documentations of gossip around the Parisian elites of the Belle Époque. I recently had the privilege of reading Marcel Proust’s 20th century masterpiece In Search of Lost Time (also known in English as Remembrance of Things Past, or in the original French as À la recherche du temps perdu) in its entirety.

In search of lost time complete set