Combray, Proust

Combray by Marcel Proust overall gave me an overwhelming feeling of nostalgia. It reminded me very much of, from what I can remember, being a child. I felt connected with these scenarios of family situations, being a child at family gatherings. You know who everything is, you know kind of what’s going on, you know what feelings you are feeling but as a child, you don’t truly understand the gravity of things going on or being said and why you are feeling what you are feeling. I think this is described very well in the book, the boy knows he’s feeling anxious but can’t quite pinpoint why that truly is, all he knows is he wants his mom. I especially related to the scene where he wanted to see his mother even though he was not supposed to be out of bed and the anxiousness you feel as a kid wanting to talk to your parents when you should be sleeping. So in a sense the description of that scene was nostalgic for me.

Maybe it was just my reading into it however I found some bits of the novel and its trajectory hard to understand. I never quite knew where his thoughts were leading, like some thoughts spiralled into others which as a reader caused some confusion. But when I think about children and their sporadic train of thought this thinking process made sense to me. Often the child would see something that would remind him of something else, like seeing a book and remembering that his grandma bought and returned books for him which led to a thought about his grandma’s old spending and gifting habits. Often times I forgot about what the original thought or scene was until it was circled back to.

A recurring action throughout the novel is physical cues associated with memories, tastes, smells, actions, and feelings. There were a lot of combinations of scents that caused powerful and very lucid recollections. For example the smell of varnish that reminded him of a particular staircase, the smell and taste of the madaline and tea, the “dark cool smell of both forest and ancien regime” (pg.75) of a room he used to read in. This boy has a very acute sense of smell! I was amazed at the visual detail that was thoroughly described in some of the memories, not one detail was left out which made picturing scenes in my head very easy. – 50pg

I also thought his relationship/slight obsession (?) with his mother was very almost Freudian. Overall I picked up on the themes of memory, dreams, class and lucid visuals and enjoyed the vivid imagery of the settings in the novel. I found it quite ironic when he talked of places one has not been but heard stories and seen photos of, and how seeing it is almost disappointing all while the author creates this magical land of Combray.

Question: Do you have a childhood memory that is a very vivid memory for you?