The novel then takes a further step into the past to tell of the goings-on at the Parisian salon of the bourgeois Verdurins, where social climbing and artistic accomplishment exist in incongruous and comic conjunction, and of Swann's infatuation with the courtesan Odette. A child's world and the world of adults the child can only begin to imagine unfurl before us, and Proust's pages spill over with incident and puzzlement, pathos and humor. Here we encounter Proust's narrator, restless and unfulfilled in middle age, his life weighing on him as a burden of things forgotten and things undone, until quite by chance he is brought to remember the world of his childhood, his clinging attachment to his mother, his dread of his father, summers in the country and the two walks his family regularly took, one by a great aristocratic estate, the other by the house of a certain Charles Swann, to whom a mystery was attached. Swann's Way, the first of the seven volumes that constitute Marcel Proust's lifework, In Search of Lost Time, introduces the larger themes of the whole sequence while standing on its own as a brilliant evocation of the French Belle Époque.
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