Pel cantó d'en Swann

To mark the centenary of In Search of Lost Time, Marcel Proust’s most emblematic novel, we offer you seven recitals (one for each of the seven volumes that make up the work) based on Josep Maria Pinto’s translation and selection of texts. The sessions directed by Jordi Bosch will be accompanied by piano and violin.

Proust’s novel was written between 1908 and 1922, and with James Joyce’s Ulysses, was the cornerstone of the new narrative of the twentieth century, and irreversibly transformed the way time, space and own self are narrated from what himself named 'involuntary memory'.

You can also attend in person at the Espai Lliure the seven performances of this show on the first day of broadcast.


The taste of a madeleine cake acts as a gateway to the world of memory.

Pel cantó d’en Swann [Swann's Way] marks the beginning of this great work. The texts in this session focus on Combray, the first and best known part of this novel.

It is a book of intense and contained beauty, focusing on the initiation of first the boy and later the adolescent in the cult of beauty, literature, and the discovery of his erotic drives. Ultimately, it contains the "Proust method", which is a new way of looking at things and describing them: digging into the memory, exploring tunnels which lead to memories of the past from a sensation in the present. Méséglise (or Swann) and Guermantes are two paths for walking, and two worlds that are developed during the Search and more than landscapes, they represent two ways of understanding life.

Within this process, regaining lost time does not mean returning to the past, but instead clinging to the present while using the remembrance of that past. That is why the trigger is the taste of the madeleine cake that the narrator tastes one day as an adult, which takes him back to that time in Combray, the town where he spent his summers, and the cake his aunt offered to him, dipped in tea. This stimulus, as well as the memory of a frustration in his early life (his need for a goodnight kiss from his mother), are the driving forces that help him relive all the scenarios and characters of that period in his childhood.