Nostalgy by Miguel Vandenburgh; The Pleasure, Peculiarity, and Puzzle of the Past

 Nostalgy by Miguel Vandenburgh; The Pleasure, Peculiarity, and Puzzle of the Past

By Julie Sara Porter 

Bookworm Reviews 

This review can also be found on Reedsy Discovery.

Spoilers: Nostalgia is a difficult psychological trap to fall into. It captures memories with a positive filter. It emphasizes good times and down plays sadness. It ignores that those good times weren't shared by everyone. It changes pop culture touchstones from irritating fads and sources of cringe to gold standards beyond criticism. 

Nostalgia forces people to idealize and live in the past and ignore the present in front of them. It creates a false past that has more to do with pop culture and filtered memories than reality. This trap can be found in Miguel Vandenburgh’s novel, Nostalgy.

Alejandro is a businessman who emigrated from his native Spain to Los Angeles and is on a fast track to professional success and personal misery. He hates the commute, hates this overwhelmingly loud American city, and while he is good at his job, he lacks the passion or interest in it. His thoughts often drift to old friends, past loves, and youthful adventures to the point that he can barely function at work or at home. His boss notices his depressed behavior and grants him a sabbatical. Alejandro takes the opportunity to fly back to Spain and visit his childhood home, family, old friends, and lost loves. Maybe he can find the boy that he used to be.

Nostalgy is not concerned with what it's about or who it's about but it is concerned with how it feels. Alejandro’s journey captures the mind and emotions with thoughtful evocative passages and situations that challenge the concepts of memory and reality.

In Los Angeles, Alejandro is in a constant state of stasis and inertia. Alejandro lives in the present but his mind is elsewhere. He has a good job, lives in a nice neighborhood, has friends and romantic relationships but it's all surface. He contributes to the bare minimum of his job, commute, and current friendships and relationships. Everyone else moves in the present, while he is mentally standing still in the past.

 Everyone around him moves at great speed, lives in bright colors, and loudly proclaims their emotions. Alejandro lives in a world of muted grays, silence, lumbering movements, detachment, and no emotional connection.

When Alejandro returns to Spain is when he starts recognizing color and movement. He sees the blue skies and sun’s reflections, the other commuters and travelers, and the intense euphoria that one gets when they are beginning a quest. In Alejandro's case, it's a quest to come face to face with his past.

When Alejandro returns to his Spanish hometown, he sees that it has changed. He sees more people, different buildings, companies that have franchises there that didn't exist before. He is like many whose minds are captured by the hometown of their youth and expected it to remain the same.

 They expect the landscape photographs in their mind to be unaltered but a real place isn't like a photograph. It can't and won't stay in one place forever. People move in, businesses create jobs, houses are built. The world cannot and will not remain stagnant no matter how much we want it to.

This also applies to people. Alejandro has a lovely reunion with a boyhood friend, Felix. The two walk around old haunts, live recklessly, play pranks and share intimate secrets about their past. It is like a grand adventure that is reborn decades after the last one they went on. The reunion gives Alejandro a brief moment of unbridled joy but it is only temporary.

For Alejandro the reunion with Felix is part of the goal, the answer to find out why he is stuck and whether he can find happiness. Felix however looks on it as a vacation or temporary reprieve. It's a stress reliever from his life as a single parent. He has fun then he returns. 

It doesn't have the same emotional impact for him because life didn't stop for him. Felix worked, got with someone, fathered children, and now has adult responsibilities. Alejandro has them too but life stopped in his youth. He can't mentally separate the boy that he used to be from the man that he is. It's a sad existence for him to always look forward and not back.

He also finds that sadness in other places and people as well. His father, once a proud strong man, is now weakened and made vulnerable by the natural process of age. He reunites with an old girlfriend who is pleased to see him but sets him straight by asking what he expected when coming. Did he really think that she would stay the same age and have the same personality forever? She also corrects him on many of the details reminding him that his memories are imperfect and were less how they actually were than how he wanted to be.

Nostalgy is similar to the Twilight Zone episode “Walking Distance.” In it, a burned out executive (Gig Young) returns to his childhood home exactly as it was. He has traveled backwards in time and sees his younger self and his parents. When his younger self, he mournfully tells the boy that there won't be any cotton candy, merry go rounds, nor band concerts and no pleasant memories in adulthood. His father realizes that he is in the presence of his son as an adult. He tells him to go back to his old home and his real time. “There is only one summer per customer,” and to let his younger self have his. The most important crucial information that he tells him is to look around when he gets home. He might find cotton candy, merry go rounds, and band concerts. He just hasn't been looking hard enough.

When people live inside their nostalgia, they only recall the days of their youth with optimism and pleasure. They deify the music, shows, books, fashion, news, and movies of their past without really living within them. Mentally and emotionally they are frozen in that space. 

Nostalgy suggests that there is nothing wrong with those memories or those items. They made us who we are and they serve as temporary time machines. However, we can become trapped in our past and close the present and future around us. That is what Alejandro shows, someone who can't move forward because he is frozen by facing backwards. 

Living only in our youth causes us to miss the beauty and wonder around us now. A beautiful sunset. A song that speaks to us. A fictional character that says what we are thinking. A job that encourages our talent. Finding the perfect partner. The birth of a child. Our forever home and sacred space. The advances that have been made allow us to learn, live, and enjoy life on a larger scale. The voices are finally heard and listened to when they used to be forced to recede somewhere in the background. Even when things are at their hardest, there is always something to learn, enjoy, take pride in, experience, and love.

You can't go home to the past again but you can experience the world around you and find your own cotton candy, merry go rounds, and band concerts. It takes some time but Alejandro finds his.