This is the English language title of "Á la recherche du temps perdu", literally "looking for the lost time" or "searching for lost time". It was written by Marcel Proust, and it is actually a sequence of books comprising:
- Swann's way - Du côté de chez Swann
- Within a budding grove - A l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleur
- The Guermantes way - le Côté de Guermantes
- Cities of the plain - Sodome et Gomorrhe
- The captive - la Prisonnière
- The sweet cheat gone - Albertine disparue
- The past recaptured - le Temps retrouvé
The translations of the titles are the ones Random House uses. They always sounded a bit clumsly to me, but it is difficult to render the subtle shades of meaning in Proust's titles.
This is an enormous book, and it is also a difficult and wonderful text to read. 3000 pages of memory, jealousy, penetrating self-analysis and thoughts about everything on earth (art, love, death, illness, insomnia...) take us through the development of a complex narrator and a number of interesting characters on the background of France around WWI.
| 
