Published in 1913, Swann's Way is the first of the seven parts of Marcel Proust's masterpiece, Remembrance of Things Past, one of the major achievements of 20th-century literature. The narrator discovers that an involuntary memory triggered by some casual action, say, eating a madeleine cake or stooping to remove one's shoe, has the power to recover large areas of the past; and he sets out to resurrect his past life and the people and places that most affected him.