small tear to dust jacket at top of spine, see photo "Proust was the greatest novelist of the twentieth century, just as Tolstoy was in the nineteenth," wrote Graham Greene. "For those who began to write at the end of the twenties or the beginning of the thirties, there were two great inescapable influences: Proust and Freud, who are mutually complementary." With its sweeping digressions into the past and reflections on the nature of memory, Proust's oceanic novel In Search of Lost Time looms over twentieth-century literature as one of the greatest, yet most endlessly challenging literary experiences. Influencing writers like Virginia Woolf and James Joyce, and even anticipating Albert Einstein in its philosophical explorations of space and time, In Search of Lost Time is a monumental achievement and a virtual rite of passage for any serious lover of literature. Now, in what renowned translator Arthur Goldhammer says might be "likened to a piano reduction of an orchestral score," the