Swanns Way is one of the preeminent novels of childhood a sensitive boys impressions of his family and neighbors, all brought dazzlingly back to life years later by the famous taste of a madeleine. 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 Swanns Way also stands on its own as a perfect rendering of a life in art, of the past recreated through memory.