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There is a particular pleasure in reading an autobiography where an interest in that strange country which is the past is married to a keen literary sensibility. This reflects Pontalis's interests: literature and psychoanalysis. His youth and adolescence were fuelled by a love of literature and in later life he became an analyst. His early interest was maintained by becoming a contributor to Sartre's influential journal Les Temps Modernes. He then became the editor of La Nouvelle Revue de Psychoanalyse, while also practising as an analyst.
As Adam Phillips points out in his introduction, Proust is everywhere in this book, which is as much about the process of the act of remembering through language as it is about the evocation of specific people, places and events. The book is an exploration, imbued with aphorisms and meditations on the intricate links between erstwhile, lived, sensuous experiences, of the nature of memory and language itself. The writer's self-confessed evolving love-hate relationship with his ‘anxious passion’, language, is the organizing thread and what captivated this reader.
A life, Pontalis reminds us, is irreducible to one narrative; a multiplicity of interpretations is possible. Language, the means of telling and structuring experience, is double-edged. It gives shape, order, definition and fixity to experience that was once spontaneous, vibrant and often silent. Thus, while language can convey memory, it is also that which can betray ‘the hollows’, moments of experiences such as dreaming, loving and loss. It is the moment when ‘time tables and the use of words and distribution of space all collapse. When words fail, it is because, without realizing it, one is about to touch a different earth.’