'I was at one of those periods in youth--vacant without any particular love object--when like
a lover seeing his beloved in all things we desire we seek we see Beauty everywhere.' In
the Shadow of Girls in Blossom the second volume of Proust's In Search of Lost Time (1913-27)
is a novel of exploration and (self-) discovery continuing the story of the narrator's youth
and adolescence. From the enclosed spaces of the fin-de-siècle social world that revolves
around Madame Swann we move to the fictional town of Balbec on the Normandy coast a place
where the social classes intermingle with mutual fascination. Against the ever-changing
backdrop of the sea--a constant reminder of beauty mutability and the vastness of the world
beyond individual human affairs--the narrator encounters individuals who will shape his
experience and indelibly colour his outlook on that world. He finds a friend in the
aristocratic Robert de Saint-Loup and is perplexed by his enigmatic uncle the Baron de Charlus
he finds a tutelary figure in Elstir the gifted idiosyncratic painter and in Albertine he
comes to recognise the blossoming girl who will become the love--and the bane--of his life.
The novel provides a breath-taking illumination of what it is to encounter beauty and to seek
to understand our relation to it in people in experiences in art or the landscape around
us. An exploration of the thrills of infatuation the fallibility of perception and how desire
builds and ebbs the narrative prepares readers for the love affair that will define the
narrator's future existence and shape the volumes of In Search of Lost Time to come. ABOUT THE
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