The text opens with an olfactory image that brings about an involuntary memory in the narrator. The term "involuntary memory" was coined by the French writer Marcel Proust and it refers to those moments of every day life when a sensory experience triggers a recollection of past events. It is called "involuntary" because it doesn´t entail a conscious intention to remember.
In chapter one, the smell that evokes the memories is an "embarrasingly familiar breath of sweetness" that appears towards the end of June and that the narrator cannot identify clearly. Its source seems to be the first mystery to be solved in the novel.
The smell is introduced first with the pronoun "it"("(...) and there it is again"), and its referent ("breath of sweetness") appears only some words later. In this way, the narrator conveys the indefiniteness that clouds the smell for him. He seems to need a pause (marked by the colon) to find the right words to describe this "it" that comes every June, and that mystifies him so much.
The second paragraph stresses the same idea. The first sentence starts with a modal of deduction ("It must come from one of the gardens") showing the narrator´s incapacity not only to name the plant that gives it off but even to determine its location. He even finds it difficult to define the perfume exactly. His assertions about it and about the effects it has on him are interrupted by questions like "And what is it?" "I feel...What?" These questions suggest once more that the nature of the smell is so elusive that he needs time to elaborate his answers. He also uses a lot of vague terms to suggest his difficulty to express what this smell is like or what it makes him feel: "It is
something quite harsh and coarse" "It has
a kind of sexual urgency" "I have
a kind of homesickness for where I am" "I have a feeling that
something, somewhere has been left unresolved." At the same time, these terms engage the reader, who shares the narrator´s need to clarify all this vagueness and indefinition.
In the hope to find somebody who can help him define the source of his unrest, the narrator asks his daughter where the smell comes from. She explains it comes from "liguster", a very common shrub. The word doesn´t seem to conjure up any mental image in the narrator, and he even wakes up in the middle of the night obssessed by the word.( At this point, we all agreed it is a pity he couldn´t have access to Google!) But, luckily he goes down to the dictionary and he solves the first mystery by realising his daughter wasn´t speaking English when she uttered the name of the plant. The English equivalent is still not revealed to us, but at least the narrator seems relieved to have been able to find it. At the same time, he feels a bit ashamed as it seems "a ridiculously banal and inappropriate cue for such powerful feelings".
The feelings and the memories the perfume brings about are related to the narrator´s childhood. He would like to go back to the place where he grew up in the hope to find his former home. He feels tempted to book a flight to that "far-off nearby land". This last phrase is a paradox, i.e. a seeming contradiction. In class, it took us some time to work out possible interpretations of this paradox. Juan suggested it may mean that even though that land is a near place, the narrator feels it is far away because he can´t visit it as often as he would like. Franco M. said it may be far away as regards distance, but the narrator may feel its closeness because of the powerful feelings it arouses. Another possible interpretation is that it is a nearby place but it is felt as if it were far off because it is related to a distant past.
In any case, a smell which is qualified with negative words like " vulgar", "coarse", "harsh", and whose source cannot be clearly identified has the power to unsettle the narrator completely and to send him off in a quest to understand some past secrets and mysteries.
