n the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower is a spectacular dissection of male and female adolescence, and an unequalled meditation on different forms of love, charged with the narrator’s memories of Paris and the Normandy seaside, and his relationships with his grandmother and the Swann family. Here Proust introduces some of his greatest comic inventions, from the magnificently dull M. de Norpois to the enchanting Robert de Saint-Loup, and introduces two figures who come to dominate the narrator’s life – the Baron de Charlus and the mysterious Albertine.

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