I read The Story of a Child along with a short story, The Child in the House, by Walter Pater, for my reading around Proust book club. They were strikingly similar to one another - and also to Proust - in their approach to memory of childhood. As I tweeted while reading it, I would highly recommend the Loti to anyone who has considered reading Proust but would like to read roughly 150 pages rather than 4000+ pages. It doesn't have the descriptions of society, the cast of characters, the families across generations that you find in Proust. But Loti's descriptions of his memory of childhood is as evocative as Proust. Furthermore, Loti's narrative gives some examples of that idea of memoire involuntaire we think of as so Proustian. Of course we know that Proust didn't invent the idea of mnemonic associations, but it's striking because Loti's The Story of a Child was published some 15 years before Swann's Way. In conclusion, this is a lovely little book that made me want to visit all the locales in rural France described therein. It also made me want to try to reconstruct my own childhood in this manner. Perhaps this is a project for 2017.
Conveniently for anyone who wants to read it, The Story of a Child is available for free here.
