The Guermantes Way

Marcel Proust · 1871–1922 · France

Originally Le Côté de Guermantes (French)

Why it matters

The narrator finally enters the aristocratic salon he's worshipped from afar, and finds the beau monde's charm curdling into snobbery and cruelty once he's inside it. His grandmother's death interrupts the social comedy with the novel's first great confrontation with mortality.

At a glance

Sustained set-piece salon scenes and minute social analysis stretch the sentences even longer.