Marcel Proust · 1913 · exile

Marcel Proust's novel in seven volumes, published from 1913 to 1927. A man recovers his whole life through involuntary memory - a madeleine dipped in tea, an uneven paving stone - between the village of his childhood, the salons of Paris, a Normandy hotel and a Venice promised since boyhood. The railway runs through all of it; Proust writes a timetable the way other novelists write weather.

1. 1
   Combray

   The childhood village, recovered entire from a madeleine dipped in tea - and divided by the two walks that give the novel its architecture: Swann's Way toward Méséglise, and the Guermantes Way along the Vivonne.

2. 2
   Paris

   The family apartment, the Champs-Élysées where he plays with Gilberte Swann, and in time the Faubourg Saint-Germain - salons he spends volumes contriving to enter, and rather less time enjoying once he is inside them.

3. 3
   Balbec

   The Grand Hôtel on the Normandy coast, reached by the one twenty-two from Saint-Lazare - where the little band of girls appear along the front, Albertine among them, and the painter Elstir teaches him how to look.

4. 4
   Doncières

   Saint-Loup's garrison town, where the narrator goes among the officers hoping for an introduction to the Duchesse - a composite place, built largely on the Orléans where Proust served his own year in the army.

5. 5
   Venice

   The trip promised since childhood and taken at last with his mother, after Albertine - San Marco and its baptistery, and a city he finds he is looking at through everything he has already lost.

6. 6
   Paris

   At the Guermantes matinée he stumbles on uneven paving stones and Venice comes back whole - and he understands that the book he has failed all his life to begin is the one that would recover every bit of it.