Like Proust, Philippe Claudel tries to stop time, preserving in memory those moments that you don’t want to part with, which are like flashes of bright light on a monochromatic canvas of everyday life. A person is alive as long as he feels, and smell is the most powerful catalyst for feelings and memories .The smell of tomatoes that my mother cooked in a large saucepan, the aroma of acacia that was fried in dough, the incomparable spirit when my grandmother fried garlic... He who knows how to feel is a happy person: he knows what life smells like, and he subject to the passage of time.Excerpt from the novelAs an advertisementTranslated from French by Leonid Efimov