Nostalgia

Swann’s Way

Marcel Proust · 1913

The most famous account of memory ever written, and worth persevering with. Proust’s narrator tastes a small cake dipped in tea and, without warning, his entire childhood floods back, whole and vivid. That is nostalgia exactly: not a decision to remember but an ambush of remembering. You need not read all seven volumes. The first, alone, will change how you notice your own sudden returns to the past.

“The places we have known belong now only to the little world of space on which we map them for our own convenience.”

The Go-Between

L. P. Hartley · 1953

An old man looks back on one hot summer of his boyhood, when he carried messages between two lovers and understood almost nothing of what he was part of. Its opening line has become the definition of nostalgia itself. Hartley captures the strange double vision of looking back: the child who lived it and the adult who finally sees it, a whole life apart.

“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.”

Speak, Memory

Vladimir Nabokov · 1951

Nabokov’s memoir of a lost Russian childhood, written by a man who could never go home again because the country of his youth had ceased to exist. It is nostalgia raised to an art form: precise, unsentimental, luminous. He does not weep over what was taken. He rebuilds it, detail by detail, and shows that memory, held carefully enough, is its own kind of return.

A Moveable Feast

Ernest Hemingway · 1964

Hemingway’s memoir of being young and poor and happy in 1920s Paris, written near the end of his life when all of it was long gone. It is the warmest thing he ever wrote. For anyone who lives in France, or dreams of it, or simply misses a chapter that felt golden, it is the perfect companion: proof that a time can be lost and still, in the remembering, be kept.

“If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go it stays with you.”

The Hare with Amber Eyes

Edmund de Waal · 2010

A family history told through a collection of tiny Japanese carvings, netsuke, passed down and scattered across a century of upheaval. De Waal follows the objects through Paris and Vienna and exile, and in doing so writes beautifully about how memory attaches itself to things we can hold. A quiet, gorgeous book for anyone who keeps the small relics of a life.

Brideshead Revisited

Evelyn Waugh · 1945

Charles Ryder returns, years later and by accident, to the great house where he was once happy and young, and the whole golden, doomed world of his youth comes back to him. It is the classic English novel of nostalgia: for a place, a friendship, a self that could not last. Melancholy, funny and beautiful, and unbearably tender about the way we ache for what is finished.