O primeiro volume da aguardada nova tradução de À procura do tempo perdido, uma das obras-primas da literatura mundial. Para o lado de Swann é o primeiro dos sete livros que compõem o romance À procura do tempo perdido . Neste trabalho inigualável, Marcel Proust parte das experiências do Narrador para investigar o significado do tempo, da arte, do amor e da existência. Publicado originalmente em 1913, este tomo apresenta o leitor às reminiscências da infância do Narrador e a personagens como Charles e Gilberte Swann, Odette de Crécy e conde de Forcheville. É também aqui que está presente o icônico episódio das madalenas—quando o Narrador, ao provar um bolinho, é tomado por uma alegria imensa, fruto da memória involuntária das férias que passava em Combray. Mario Sergio Conti, que assina a tradução, a introdução e as notas desta edição, destaca a polivalência temporal do Narrador, que "raciocina acerca do que acontece no presente, e também adota a perspectiva de quem está no futuro e analisa o passado". O volume inclui prefácio de Etienne Sauthier, que contextualiza a recepção da obra proustiana no Brasil.
Author
Marcel Proust was a French novelist, best known for his 3000 page masterpiece À la recherche du temps perdu (Remembrance of Things Past or In Search of Lost Time), a pseudo-autobiographical novel told mostly in a stream-of-consciousness style. Born in the first year of the Third Republic, the young Marcel, like his narrator, was a delicate child from a bourgeois family. He was active in Parisian high society during the 80s and 90s, welcomed in the most fashionable and exclusive salons of his day. However, his position there was also one of an outsider, due to his Jewishness and homosexuality. Towards the end of 1890s Proust began to withdraw more and more from society, and although he was never entirely reclusive, as is sometimes made out, he lapsed more completely into his lifelong tendency to sleep during the day and work at night. He was also plagued with severe asthma, which had troubled him intermittently since childhood, and a terror of his own death, especially in case it should come before his novel had been completed. The first volume, after some difficulty finding a publisher, came out in 1913, and Proust continued to work with an almost inhuman dedication on his masterpiece right up until his death in 1922, at the age of 51. Today he is widely recognized as one of the greatest authors of the 20th Century, and À la recherche du temps perdu as one of the most dazzling and significant works of literature to be written in modern times.
