Remembrance of Things Past: Volume II - The Guermantes Way & Cities of the Plain (Vintage)

Before his death in 1922, Marcel Proust accomplished the monumental feat of recording Remembrance of Things Past, a fifteen-volume literary history, much of which was based upon his own adventures and minute observations. The Guermantes Way is an installation in this collection and recounts, among other things, his childhood in Combray and the relevance of grasping the importance of particular events and people from his past in his development as a writer. Although autobiographical, Proust employs suspense and the observation of minutiae to illustrate our own subjective existence.