'I was at one of those periods in youth--vacant, without any particular love object--when, like a lover seeing his beloved in all things, we desire, we seek, we see Beauty everywhere.'

In the Shadow of Girls in Blossom, the second volume of Proust's In Search of Lost Time (1913-27), is a novel of exploration and (self-) discovery, continuing the story of the narrator's youth and adolescence. From the enclosed spaces of the fin-de-siècle social world that revolves around Madame Swann, we move to the fictional town of Balbec on the Normandy coast, a place where the social classes intermingle with mutual fascination. Against the ever-changing backdrop of the sea--a constant reminder of beauty, mutability, and the vastness of the world beyond individual human affairs--the narrator encounters individuals who will shape his experience and indelibly colour his outlook on that world. He finds a friend in the aristocratic Robert de Saint-Loup and is perplexed by his enigmatic uncle the Baron de Charlus; he finds a tutelary figure in Elstir, the gifted, idiosyncratic painter; and in Albertine he comes to recognise the blossoming girl who will become the love--and the bane--of his life.

The novel provides a breath-taking illumination of what it is to encounter beauty and to seek to understand our relation to it, in people, in experiences, in art, or the landscape around us. An exploration of the thrills of infatuation, the fallibility of perception, and how desire builds and ebbs, the narrative prepares readers for the love affair that will define the narrator's future existence and shape the volumes of In Search of Lost Time to come.

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