In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower » (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)

Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust was a French novelist, essayist and critic, best known as the author of la recherche du temps perdu (in English, In Search of Lost Time; earlier translated as Remembrance of Things Past), a monumental work of 20th-century fiction published in seven parts from 1913 to 1927.

In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower is Proust's spectacular dissection of male and female adolescence, charged with the narrator's memories of Paris and the Normandy seaside. At the heart of the story lie his relationships with his grandmother and with the Swann family. As a meditation on different forms of love, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower has no equal. Here, Proust introduces some of his greatest comic inventions, from the magnificently dull M. de Norpois to the enchanting Robert de Saint-Loup. It is memorable as well for the first appearance of the two figures who for better or worse are to dominate the narrator's life—the Baron de Charlus and the mysterious Albertine.

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In the Shadow is the second installment in Penguin's popular new translation of Proust's masterwork, In Search of Lost Time. Pleasures is a collection of short stories and character sketches. Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.