In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust (1927)

Dip a small shell-shaped cake into lime-blossom tea, raise it to your lips, and a forgotten childhood Sunday rises whole from nowhere, the entire town and everyone who lived in it, summoned by a single taste. That involuntary jolt is the engine of Proust's enormous book, the discovery that the past is not lost but folded inside sensation, waiting for the accidental flavour or sound that no act of will can recover. Across thousands of pages the narrator believes himself a failure, too weak to write, too jealous to love, too dazzled by the salons of the Faubourg Saint-Germain to see the people in them clearly, while a single evening in a drawing room swells across a hundred sentences and the prose keeps circling and deepening until you forget you are reading and simply remember. Proust composed the last of it in a cork-lined room as his lungs gave way, and reaches the only ending vast enough to hold everything behind it: the resolve, at last, to begin.