It is not easy to summarise a novel which accompanied its author throughout his adult life as a proliferating extension of his experiences in the world and in the imagination. Digression and leisurely speculation are essential to it, there is a wealth of incident but no plot to be outlined; and for all the power of aesthetic and psychological analysis we find in it, the philosophical viewpoint is not explicitly argued by the author but is left to be deduced by the reader.

Proust's title above contains a kind of pun to which he drew attention in a letter to a publisher. If we render it literally as In Search of Time Lost, the play on words is fainter than it is in French. The English emphasises the poetic nuance of ‘time that has vanished’ at the expense of the everyday meaning of ‘perdre son temps’ - the usual expression for ‘to waste one's time’ thus in French the poetic and mundane possibilities are balanced, as they are when Shakespeare's Richard II says, ‘I wasted time, and now doth time waste me.'

The title of the first book of the seven-part novel is Du Cote de chez Swann, and is explained by its author as deriving from a country speech-habit which has a close parallel in English. Whether the name used is that of a family, a house, a wood or a village, in both languages a topographical reference ('going in the direction of …’) is intended - as in 'up/down/over Hutchinson's/Tatchbury/Copythorne way' - an allusion to a local landmark. It is, then, clear that when we place level stress on the words ‘Swann's way’, we do not read them with the intonation their real meaning requires, but it becomes plain, with its secondary resonance, in the text.

At the opening of the novel, a narrator evokes his childhood and develops ideas about memory. His family have two favourite walks when they are staying at Combray, one that takes them past Tansonville, the property of their friend Charles Swann, towards, but never as far as, Meseglise, and the other beside the river (la Vivonne) in the direction of the estate of Guermantes.