In Search of Lost Time: Sodom and Gomorrah V. 4 Paperback - 1999

First line

The reader will remember that, well before going that day (the day on which the Princesse de Guermantes's reception was to be held) to pay the Duke and Duchess the visit I have just described, I had kept watch for their return and in the course of my vigil had made a discovery which concerned M. de Charlus in particular but was in itself so important that I have until now, until the moment when I could give it the prominence and treat it with the fullness that it demanded, postponed giving an account of it.

From the jacket flap

"Sodom and Gomorrah opens a new phase of "In Search of Lost Time. While watching the pollination of the Duchess de Guer-mantes's orchid, the narrator secretly observes a sexual encounter between two men. "Flower and plant have no conscious will," Samuel Beckett wrote of Proust's representation of sexuality. "They are shameless, exposing their genitals. And so in a sense are Proust's men and women . . . shameless. There is no question of right and wrong."
For this authoritative English-language edition, D. J. Enright has revised the late Terence Kilmartin's acclaimed reworking of C. K. Scott Moncrieff's translation to take into account the new definitive French editions of "A la recherche du temps perdu (the final volume of these new editions was published by the Bibliotheque de la Pleiade in 1989).

Media reviews

“The thing about Proust is his combination of the utmost sensibility with the utmost tenacity. He searches out these butterfly shades to the last grain.”—Virginia Woolf

Citations

• Newsweek, 09/17/2007, Page 18