While the cast is larger than can be taken in at a single reading, its principal players are indelible: Charles Swann and Odette de Crécy, whose wretched affair is described in “Swann’s Way” the Duke and Duchess of Guermantes, whose circle the narrator works so hard to penetrate the Baron de Charlus, a refined but poisonous gargoyle whose sexual proclivities fascinate our hero the pretentious Verdurins the perplexing Albertine, an object of sinister fixation for several volumes. Characters fall in and out of love, marry up, disgrace themselves, disappear for hundreds of pages, die. Intermittence, he observes, is a law not just of society but also of the soul. “Like a kaleidoscope which is every now and then given a turn,” he writes, “society arranges successively in different orders elements which one would have supposed to be immovable, and composes a fresh pattern.” The chessboard movements of Proust’s actors are just one element of his grand design, however. A revised version of the Scott Moncrieff/Kilmartin translation of Proust - a new edition of the classic text in six volumes. Another Proustian axiom concerns social mobility.
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