Marcel Proust

Charles Kenneth Scott Moncrieff

In the second volume of Proust's incredible novel, the storyteller arises as an entertainer in the show of his own life. Swann has now dwindled into a spouse for his previous paramour, Odette, and their girl, Gilberte, turns into the juvenile storyteller's close companion and enticing adoration object. We move from Paris to the ocean side town of Balbec, from ritualized social exhibitions to midsummer immediacy and from Gilberte to her replacement, Albertine. In Balbec, the storyteller is gotten to know by the painter Elstir who acquaints him both with the art of painting and to the strange 'little band' of young ladies. Creative instruction is in this way unpredictably joined with an excursion of sexual self-revelation.

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