In his new novel, “The Trolley,” French author and Nobel Prize-winner Claude Simon offers a beautiful depiction of how memory links the past to the present.

Its premise is that the foundation of a person’s life is what he remembers, and that so much of whom a person becomes stems from where that person has been and how he got there.

The book starts as one man’s reminiscence of his youth and of the trolley he rode to school each day in his hometown in southern France. As the trolley’s path is recounted, the past is evoked and the story becomes subject to the whim of memory.

The tale moves back and forth from his childhood to his hospital bed, where, as an old man, he is being treated for fever and seemingly near death. He rolls through life on a gurney, which also elicits memories that ebb and flow from the past to the present.

The narration is that of a man who is trying to hold on to something, its flow is that of someone who is trying to say everything he can recall, savoring memories as if he fears he’s about to lose them.

Simon’s attention to the smallest detail is astounding and captivating: As he intricately describes the motorman’s cab of the trolley, the reader feels like a child again, enthralled with the minutiae and the thrill of watching the motorman work.