Suggestive of the style and subject matter of Marcel Proust (1871-1922), French novelist who wrote but one novel (in many volumes) throughout his life: A La Recherche Perdu (Remembrance of Things Past) . It has many autobiographical elements.
Proust is known for his exhaustive, almost mesmeric immersion in the past in order to retrieve it whole. His sentences are often a full page long, convoluted, so that no nuance of feeling or observation is lost.
Proust developed the idea that our memory is not like a vase in which all the contents...all the things that we have 'felt' in the past...are available simultaneously. No, the heart has it's intermittencies and memories come flooding back to us in their full, sensuous force only when triggered involuntarily by tastes or smells or other sensations over which we have no control. Proust�s writing explores the influence of past experience on present reality.
The novel is permeated with the memory of sickly jealousies and heartaches, which are essential to Proustian Love. Overwhelmingly, the novel depicts in infinite detail the life of the Frech bourgeoisie from the second half of the 19th century to the outbreak of World War 1.
Use: The remark unleashed a Proustian flood of memories
