CANR
WORK TITLE: Room on the Sea
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: https://andreaciman.com/
CITY: New York
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
LAST VOLUME: CANR 333
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born January 2, 1951, in Alexandria, Egypt; son of Regina and Henri N. Aciman; married, wife’s name Susan Wiviott (CEO of the Bridge, Inc.); children: Alexander (journalist), twins Philip and Michael.
EDUCATION:Lehman College, B.A. (English and Comparative Literature), 1973; Harvard University, M.A., Ph.D. (Comparative Literature), 1988.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer, educator, novelist, essayist, memoirist, and scholar. Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, assistant professor of French, beginning 1990; Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, associate professor of French, beginning 1997; City University of New York Graduate Center, New York, NY, chair of comparative literature and director of the Writers’ Institute, distinguished professor; Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT, visiting distinguished writer, 2009. Has also taught at Harvard University Graduate School, City University of New York, Bard College, New York University, Princeton University, and New School.
AWARDS:Whiting Foundation Writers’ Award, 1995, for Out of Egypt; Guggenheim fellowship, 1997; New York Institute for the Humanities fellowship, 1998; New York Public Library’s Center for Scholars and Writers fellowship, 2000; Lambda Literary Award, 2007, for Call Me by Your Name.
RELIGION: JewishWRITINGS
Contributor to books, including The Best American Essays, Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA), 1998-2000, 2003, and 2005; and The Best American Travel Writing, Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA). Contributor of articles and reviews to periodicals, including Condé-Nast Traveler, Los Angeles Times Book Review, New Yorker, New York Times Magazine, Paris Review, New Republic, Partisan Review, Granta, Threepenny Review, andNew York Review of Books.
SIDELIGHTS
Now living in the United States, where he teaches comparative literature, André Aciman has charmed readers with reflections on his childhood in Egypt and the ramifications of being exiled from one’s homeland. His 1994 book, Out of Egypt: A Memoir, and his 2000 collection of essays, False Papers: Essays on Exile and Memory, earned him a reputation as a skilled writer and a careful, engaging observer on the subjects of home and family.
The events described in Out of Egypt span the greater part of the twentieth century, beginning with Aciman’s family’s arrival in Egypt and ending with his visits to aged aunts and uncles in England, Italy, and France many decades later. The author draws a multifaceted picture that includes the complex web of his extended family, individual characters, and the lifestyle of the wealthy in Alexandria, Egypt, while the family lived there. His family is carefully scrutinized, revealing both their greatest faults and their smallest kindnesses. As a result, the memoir is filled with social, cultural, political, psychological, and personal analysis.
When members of Aciman’s family moved from Constantinople (now Istanbul, Turkey) to Alexandria in 1905, they were led by his great-uncle Isaac, who was a friend of Fouad, who became king of Egypt. The family’s connection to affluence gave Aciman childhood memories of basking in the sun at a seaside villa and of waiters bringing lavish trays of pastries and hot chocolate. Such memories are crowded with aunts, uncles, and grandparents, a supportive but often bitter group. Aciman tells many stories from before his birth, such as his parents’ courtship and the ensuing love-hate relationship between his grandmothers. He tells of his Uncle Vili, who at age ninety was living as an English gentleman on a country estate but who had once been an admirer of Mussolini as well as a spy for the British. And Aciman describes how in 1942 the family listened to a young woman named Flora, who would become his aunt, playing Schubert on the piano while the sounds of Rommel’s tanks attacking the city boomed in the background.
As a child Aciman did not consider himself Turkish or Egyptian. He describes family members as Anglophiles who spoke of French or Italian roots. They preferred not to proclaim their Jewishness. However, their identity as Jews could not be denied in the coming years. After the Suez war in 1956, the family was exiled from Egypt amidst growing anti-Semitism. The members moved to Italy, France, and England, having lost much of their great wealth. Aciman’s father lost his wool mill in 1964 and was expelled after trying to convert to Christianity.
While Aciman’s sometimes eccentric family provided him with interesting material, their experiences alone are not what made Out of Egypt appealing to reviewers. New Republic critic Marc Robinson explained: “At the outset, Out of Egypt promises to be simply a book of vignettes and character sketches—a distinguished personal history in an overcrowded field. Before long, though, it is also a book about the difficult work of memory itself.” Robinson praised the author for his ability to balance nostalgia with truth telling. He found that this “elegant memoir is full of cucumber lotion and Schubert melodies, Parmesan cheese and the clatter of backgammon chips,” even as a “clear-eyed (and dry-eyed) detachment freshens Aciman’s prose. He is fond but not wistful, just as he is penetrating but not cold.”
Robinson asserted that Aciman manages to successfully walk the border separating memoir from fiction, as did Barry Unsworth in the New York Times Book Review. “It is one of the several fascinations of this book that we are conscious as we read of the narrow line between facts of experience and memory and facts of imagination,” said Unsworth. “If Mr. Aciman were less sensitive and less accomplished as a writer, this occasional uncertainty we feel as to sources might seem a fault. … He has a marvelous eye for detail and a subtle sense of psychology. However he came by the knowledge, I believe him.” He concluded: “It is Mr. Aciman’s great achievement that he has re-created a world gone forever now, and given us an ironical and affectionate portrait of those who were exiled from it.”
The memoir was also commended by Los Angeles Times Book Review writer Richard Eder, who said: “ Out of Egypt is beautifully remembered and even more beautifully written. Aciman writes of a dazzling time and place populated by lavish and theatrical characters. His book is written, in fact, like a musical variety act. Each of its six chapters tends to single out one or two characters out of the ensemble.” A Publishers Weekly reviewer enthused that Aciman “recalls with a magical sensibility streaked with antic humor. A marvelous memento of a place, time and people that have all disappeared.”
As editor and contributor, Aciman published the collection Letters of Transit: Five Authors Reflect on Exile, Identity, Language, and Loss. The authors of the other original essays are Eva Hoffman, writing about losing the use of her native language after moving from Poland to Canada; Bharati Mukherjee, describing her assimilation into a new culture as a self-described “mongrelizer”; Edward Said, writing on changing identity and conflicting allegiances during post-colonialism; and Charles Simic, with recollections on moving from Belgrade to Manhattan as a sixteen-year-old. In the New York Times Book Review, Daniel Zalewski commented that as a group the writers “suggest that an uprooted life can, paradoxically, become a more fertile one.” A Publishers Weekly critic found that the “distinguished contributors … agree that a homeland tends to be a nostalgic, imaginary place.”
Aciman’s own essay reflects on his inability to live in the United States without seeing disturbing resonances to other places. Sights in New York City, such as a small park set in a traffic island, trigger memories of Alexandria, Rome, and Paris. As Zalewski noted, Aciman “laments that his remembrances of cities past … have infected his vision of the United States.” A Publishers Weekly reviewer commented that “Aciman beautifully captures the role that imagination plays in one’s experience of ‘home.’” Writing in Booklist, Mary Carroll described Aciman’s piece as commentary on “the lack of roots that seems to be a modern condition.”
False Papers, a collection of fourteen essays about exile, explores how memory becomes more desirable than fact. Wendy Lesser, writing in the New York Times Book Review, called Aciman “the poet of disappointed love … the poet of the city.” National Post critic Kathryn Morris wrote: “When Aciman writes directly about his past, he writes beautifully,” and she called Aciman’s “singular life a fascinating subject.”
Donna Seaman described the essays in Booklist as “piquant and confidently ambiguous travel stories.” “Such insights illuminate the most shadowy corners of memory and motivation,” added a reviewer in Publishers Weekly. Library Journal reviewer Nancy P. Shires concluded that “Aciman dissects his feelings so thoroughly that many readers will recognize themselves.”
Aciman served as editor for The Proust Project, a collection of essays inspired by French author Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. Writers such as Louis Auchincloss, Susan Minot, and Alain de Botton contributed to the volume, offering their perspective on a favorite passage from Proust’s epic work.
“What emerges is unusually serious,” observed Spectator critic Anita Brookner, noting that it “sheds additional light on the structure of the text, which is not principally about memory, as is so often claimed, but about introspection and what it has to teach.” “This title is full of intriguing moments of appreciation, ripe for sampling by seasoned Proustians,” a Publishers Weekly reviewer stated. “ The Proust Project is an admirable companion for the addict, and an ideal introduction for those who remain to be converted,” Brookner concluded.
In 2007 Aciman published his debut novel, Call Me by Your Name, described by a contributor to Kirkus Reviews as “a quiet, literate and impeccably written love story.” The work concerns the relationship between seventeen-year-old Elio, a professor’s son who is spending the summer at his family’s Italian villa, and twenty-four-year-old Oliver, an American scholar who accepts an invitation to the mansion from Elio’s father.
“What begins as a casual friendship develops into a passionate yet clandestine affair,” noted Heidi Dolamore in School Library Journal, and Library Journal critic Sarah Conrad Weisman remarked that Aciman “describes Elio’s anxiety, uncertainty, awkwardness, and, later, passion in incredibly vivid detail, leaving no thought process unexplored.” “A coming-of-age story, a coming-out story, a Proustian meditation on time and desire, a love letter, an invocation and something of an epitaph, Call Me by Your Name is also an open question,” wrote Stacey D’Erasmo in the New York Times Book Review. “It is an exceptionally beautiful book that cannot quite bring itself to draw the inevitable conclusion about axis-shifting passion that men and women of the world might like to think they will always reach—that obscure object of desire is, by definition, ungraspable, indeterminate and already lost at exactly the moment you rush so fervently to hold him or her.” In 2025 the novel was banned in Florida’s Hillsborough County Schools without undergoing a formal review as per either school or state policy.
Eight White Nights is Aciman’s second novel and reveals his continued fascination with the ideas of some literary giants, including Proust, Dostoevsky, Keats, Joyce, and Gerard Manley Hopkins. In the Chicago Tribune, Art Winslow found that “on the surface, Eight White Nights is an angst-ridden tale of the potential for love, playing out as a series of rendezvous over a week’s time between Clara and Aciman’s narrator. It is also, however, Aciman toying with literature’s romance with romance as a motif.” In the New York Times Book Review, Jennifer Egan suggested that “ Eight White Nights is fundamentally an homage to another Frenchman, Marcel Proust, who is so present in its pages that he goes unmentioned. Not only is the novel awash in Proust’s roomy sentences, extended metaphors and elegiac tone (not to mention his 100-page-long descriptions of dinner parties), but its preoccupations are also deeply Proustian: the unknowability of others; the distillation of experience into memory; the chasm between fantasy and reality; and, above all, the compulsive power of longing and its more optimistic cousin, anticipation.” The unnamed narrator, a single and lonely upper-middle-class young man, attends a Christmas party on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. He meets a woman, Clara, and the two immediately feel connected. What results is an eight-day affair told as a series of detailed rendezvouses between the two as remembered by the narrator. While the narrator is willing to submit entirely to the romance, Clara is not, and the reader learns of her past experiences as told to the narrator during the course of the eight nights spent together.
In a tepid review of the novel in the London Telegraph, Philip Womack noted: “Each day dawns with the narrator wondering whether he’ll see Clara again that day; each day they retrace their steps; each day ends with more inconclusive soul-searching, ‘two steps forward, one step back,’ as Clara says at one point. And, alas, it’s the same for the reader.” In the Los Angeles Times, Richard Eder commented about the plot of Eight White Nights: “Their eight-day joust is a pas de deux of finely bruised shins.” A contributor to Kirkus Reviews complimented Eight White Nights as “a mature (though not in the R-rated sense) view of adult love—smart, carefully written and always fluent.” “Aciman has deliberately set up a situation in which he can explore with enthralling intensity the behaviour of a couple falling in love,” noted John De Falbe in Spectator, and he added that “Aciman writes in beautiful malleable prose that brilliantly articulates and reflects his difficult subject.”
In Alibis: Essays on Elsewhere, Aciman explores the nature of identity through the nature of place. The collection of personal essays touch on the numerous cities Aciman has lived in, and he reflects on the stages of his life in each city, combining place with time. He writes about lavender as if it were Marcel Proust’s madeleine cookie, and he comments on walking in Monet’s footsteps in Paris. Other cities explored in Aciman’s essays include Barcelona and Alexandria. In Moment, Erica Wagner stated: “The tone of these pieces is questioning, meditative, introspective. And yet they have none—or at least very little—of the liveliness and energy that a reader would hope to find with such questioning, and come to expect from a writer as acclaimed as Aciman.” However, a Kirkus Reviews critic felt that Aciman’s meditations “filter the present through an ever-shifting palette of sensuous memory and impression”; thus, his “essays sing with bracing clarity.” Seconding this opinion in Publishers Weekly, a reviewer declared: “These pieces drill into the brain.” Casey Bayer, writing in Booklist, found that “readers exploring identity and one’s place in the world will find Aciman’s ideas worth the reading.”
An unnamed Jewish Egyptian graduate student is the protagonist of Harvard Square, a novel about two West African immigrants in Boston during the 1970s. The student meets and befriends an Arab cab driver named Kalaj, and they discover that they were both raised in the Mediterranean. They spend the summer drinking at bars and hitting on women. When school is about to start again, the student realizes that the working-class world Kalaj inhabits is far removed from the rarified halls of his ivy-league education. A Publishers Weekly reviewer found that “our hero is torn between the camaraderie he feels for Kalaj and his desire to assimilate.” The nearly unbridgeable gap strains the friendship, and then Kalaj faces deportation. The tale is “a rather modest addition to immigrant experience literature,” a Kirkus Reviews contributor found, but a New Yorker critic called Harvard Square a “timely, affecting novel.” Lynn Weber, writing in Booklist, was somewhat ambivalent, commenting: “Although Aciman’s plotting is jumpy, Harvard Square provides an interesting look at the dilemmas of identity.” Offering more enthusiastic approval in his Library Journal assessment, James Coan announced: “Aciman probes the experience of immigrants and their dislocation and captures the youth and energy of his two main characters.”
Enigma Variations, a novel published in 2017, tells the story of the love life of a man named Paul. As a young man, Paul spends his summers with his family on the Italian island of San Giustiniano. There, he falls for a local craftsman named Giovanni but never pursues a romance with him. During college, Paul has another unconsummated love affair with a woman named Chloe. Later, he moves to New York and begins dating Maud. When their relationship sours, Paul pursues an affair with Manfred, his tennis partner. Paul also goes back to San Giustiniano to find Giovanni, but he discovers the man has changed.
Brad Hooper, a reviewer in Booklist, commented: “Aciman’s sensuous, subtle language supports … his marvelous descriptive power.” “Aciman’s … sophisticated and erudite novel is constructed of chapters that feel like interlocking stories,” noted Reba Leading in Library Journal. A contributor to Kirkus Reviews suggested: “Aciman … immerses readers in a milieu that is achingly sensuous—and sensual, too.” The same contributor stated that the book offers “an eminently adult look at desire and attachment, with all the usual regrets and then some.” A Publishers Weekly writer remarked: “Aciman’s novel speaks earnestly not only of longing and lust, but also of more complicated emotions.” Dan Calhoun, a critic in the Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide, asserted: “ Enigma Variations avoids easy explanations. Aciman has created a container in which his protagonist keeps replaying situations with minor changes to create a study of a man searching for something he cannot find: himself.”
[open new]
Aciman wrote a sequel to his wildly popular book Call Me By Your Name, which was made into an Academy Award-winning film. The sequel, Find Me, returns to the father, Samuel, and his son, Elio, ten years later. Now divorced Samuel, who thought love had passed him by at his age, boards a train from Rome to Florence to see Elio, now a classical pianist, perform. On the
train he meets a young photographer, American expatriate Miranda, half his age. But as they talk they realize they are soulmates and plan a future together. A few years later, Elio moves to Paris and takes up with a new love, the much older Michel. Back in the States, Elio’s past love, Oliver, is a professor at a New York college, unhappily married and with a family, but still earning for Elio. Oliver ends his marriage and travels to Europe to search for Elio.
Despite readers spending the first half of the book waiting for the appearance of Elio and Oliver, “we are given a book that explores what can happen when your life gets away from you, when you realize just how much time you’ve wasted,” declared Josh Dubott in New York Times Book Review. The core themes of “fatherhood, music, the nature of time and fate, the weight and promise of the past—are infused with eroticism, nostalgia, and tenderness in fluid prose,” reported a Publishers Weekly reviewer who praised Aciman’s sensual and cerebral stories that touch the heart. Michael Cart in Booklist commented: “Call Me By Your Name was widely praised for its treatment of the nature of love, a theme that Find Me continues with subtlety and grace.”
Roman Year, Aciman’s new memoir that picks up where his 1994 memoir Out of Egypt left off, finds 14-year-old Aciman, his younger brother, and deaf and mute mother exiled from his native Alexandria, Egypt, for being Jewish. They land in a refugee camp in Naples when Aciman is 14, then on to Rome in 1965 when Aciman is 16. His father, the wealthy owner of a fabric-dyeing factory, went to Paris. The mother and sons now find themselves poor refugees at the mercy of their berating Uncle Claude who offers them an apartment that was once a brothel. His mother easily understands the Italians, and his brother explores the Eternal City, but Aciman, feeling his life unmoored, buries himself in his books. But eventually he roams the city by foot and by bicycle and comes to love it. Attracted to girls and boys, he has an affair with a 33-year-old seamstress. No sooner than he settles in, the family is on the move again, to America.
“Aciman evokes the passing of time in rich, meandering prose, rebuilding 1960s Rome in sentences suffused with light and sound and memories,” proclaimed Aminatta Forna in New York Times Book Review, adding that the book “is both an affecting coming-of-age story and a timely, distinctive description of the haunted lives of refugees.” Ingrid D. Rowland in The American Scholar noticed that as a displaced teenager and refugee, Aciman nevertheless “experienced language, place, family, education, sexuality, wealth and poverty, beauty and ugliness in complicated mixtures that have given his writing its poignancy and its versatility, not to mention flashes of wicked humor.”
Aciman next published Room on the Sea: Three Novellas, which evokes desire, longing, and fate. The novellas were originally commissioned by Audible and first appeared in audio format, then in print. In the title story, elderly New York Paul, a retired attorney, and Catherine, a psychologist, meet as they await jury duty assignments. Although each is unhappily married, they start a whirlwind flirtation as they commiserate about their wasted lives. In the story “A Gentleman from Peru,” three vacationing Americans meet a mysterious older man named Raul, part faith healer, part mentalist, who seems to be able to diagnose one’s illness, guess their birth months, and reveal an unrequited love between two of them. The story “Mariana” finds a woman rejected by her womanizing lover who obsesses over him and savors the passion he awakened in her.
Responding to the book’s characters who let time slip by, take advantage of second chances, or be obsessed with jealousy, Aciman told Elaine Szewczyk in Publishers Weekly: “Who does not fantasize 90% of the time?…Basically, we’re not in the real world. We fantasize about what we should have said, what we could do.” Library Journal critic Barbara Love suggested: “Count on Aciman for stories filled with love, lust, loss, and not a small measure of regret.” A Kirkus Reviews writer found the three stories uneven, however “Aciman reprises themes of longing and memory that have informed his previous memoirs and fiction.”
[close new]
BIOCRIT
BOOKS
Aciman, André, Out of Egypt: A Memoir, Farrar, Straus (New York, NY), 1994.
PERIODICALS
American Scholar, autumn 2024, Ingrid D. Rowland, review of Roman Year: A Memoir.
Booklist, May 15, 1999, Mary Carroll, review of Letters of Transit: Five Authors Reflect on Exile, Identity, Language, and Loss, p. 1661; August, 2000, Donna Seaman, review of False Papers: Essays on Exile and Memory, p. 2102; November 15, 2003, Molly McQuade, “The Nostographer, André Aciman,” p. 571; October 15, 2004, Molly McQuade, review of The Proust Project, p. 379; November 15, 2006, Brad Hooper, review of Call Me by Your Name, p. 23; August 1, 2011, Casey Bayer, review of Alibis: Essays on Elsewhere, p. 12; March 1, 2013, Lynn Weber, review of Harvard Square, p. 18; November 1, 2016, Brad Hooper, review of Enigma Variations, p. 25; September 1, 2019, Michael Cart, review of Find Me, p. 46.
Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide, March-April, 2017, Dan Calhoun, review of Enigma Variations, p. 33.
Kirkus Reviews, November 1, 2006, review of Call Me by Your Name, p. 1087; January 15, 2010, review of Eight White Nights; July 1, 2011, review of Alibis; February 1, 2013, review of Harvard Square; October 15, 2016, review of Enigma Variations; August 15, 2019, review of Find Me; May 1, 2025, review of Room on the Sea: Three Novellas.
Library Journal, July, 2000, Nancy P. Shires, review of False Papers, p. 88; November 15, 2006, Sarah Conrad Weisman, review of Call Me by Your Name, p. 54; April 15, 2013, James Coan, review of Harvard Square, p. 71; November 1, 2016, Reba Leading, review of Enigma Variations, p. 74; April 2025, Barbara Love, review of Room on the Sea, p. 89.
Los Angeles Times Book Review, January 15, 1995, Richard Eder, review of Out of Egypt: A Memoir, pp. 3, 8.
Moment, November-December, 2011, Erica Wagner, “The Traveling Egyptian,” p. 72.
National Post, August 26, 2000, Kathryn Morris, “Author Gets No Satisfaction, Not in Paris, Not in New York,” p. B8.
New Republic, March 27, 1995, Marc Robinson, review of Out of Egypt, p. 37.
New Statesman, November 1, 1996, Boyd Tonkin, review of Out of Egypt, p. 45.
New Yorker, February 15, 2010, review of Eight White Nights, p. 141; June 3, 2013, review of Harvard Square, p. 67.
New York Review of Books, June 10, 2010, “Wake Up and Dream,” p. 34.
New York Times Book Review, February 5, 1995, Barry Unsworth, review of Out of Egypt, p. 7; July 18, 1999, Daniel Zalewski, review of Letters of Transit, p. 18; February 25, 2007, Stacey D’Erasmo, “Suddenly One Summer,” review of Call Me by Your Name, p. 11; February 21, 2010, “My Life as a French Movie,” p. 13, and “Up Front,” p. 4; December 15, 2019, Josh Duboff, review of Find Me, p. 17(L); November 17, 2024, Aminatta Forna, review of Roman Year; December 8, 2024, Leah Greenblatt, “Learning to Live in Exile,” p. 36.
Publishers Weekly, November 7, 1994, review of Out of Egypt, p. 54; April 5, 1999, review of False Papers, p. 232; July 10, 2000, review of False Papers, p. 57; August 16, 2004, review of The Proust Project, p. 49; October 9, 2006, review of Call Me by Your Name, p. 33; November 23, 2009, review of Eight White Nights, p. 37; May 23, 2011, review of Alibis, p. 36; February 25, 2013, review of Harvard Square, p. 141; October 3, 2016, review of Enigma Variations, p. 94; August 26, 2019, review of Find Me, p. 89; April 14, 2025, review of Room on the Sea, p. 32.
School Library Journal, March 1, 2007, Heidi Dolamore, review of Call Me by Your Name, p. 243.
Spectator, July 2, 2005, Anita Brookner, “An Experiment in Old Acquaintance,” review of The Proust Project, p. 34; October 30, 2010, “The Start of the Affair,” p. 43.
Star Tribune (Minneapolis, MN), March 3, 2010, “Intense Love Story More Amusing than Romantic; Book Review: This Novel about Two Manhattanites Who Meet at a Party Starts Out Magical and Ends Up Silly,” p. 4.
World Literature, November-December, 2011, review of Alibis.
ONLINE
André Aciman website, https://andreaciman.com/ (November 1, 2025).
Bookslut, http://www.bookslut.com/ (February 10, 2014), Drew Nellins, “An Interview with André Aciman.”
Chicago Tribune Online, http://featuresblogs.chicagotribune.com/ (February 17, 2010), Art Winslow, review of Eight White Nights.
City University of New York, Graduate Center Website, http://www.gc.cuny.edu/ (September 11, 2017), author faculty profile.
Los Angeles Times, http://www.articles.latimes.com/ (February 7, 2010), Richard Eder, review of Eight White Nights.
Publishers Weekly, April 21, 2025, Elaine Szewczyk, “That’s Amore: In Three Collected Novellas, Andre Aciman Explores Some Favorite Subjects: Love, Loss, and the Heart’s Secret Desires.”
Telegraph Online, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/ (February 24, 2011), Philip Womack, review of Eight White Nights.
André Aciman is the New York Times bestselling author of Call Me by Your Name, Out of Egypt, Eight White Nights, False Papers, Alibis, Harvard Square, Enigma Variations, Homo Irrealis, Roman Year, and Find Me. He is the author of the forthcoming Room on the Sea, June 24, 2025. He’s the editor of The Proust Project and teaches comparative literature at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He lives with his wife in Manhattan.
André Aciman
Faculty
Distinguished Professor, Comparative Literature, French, Biography and Memoir
Research Interests
Marcel Proust The Literature of Seventeenth-Century France Madame de LaFayette The Psychological Novel and the roman d'analyse Memoirs and Memory in the Twentieth Century
Education
Ph.D. and A.M. in Comparative Literature from Harvard University
B.A. in English and Comparative Literature from Lehman College
André Aciman earned his Ph.D. and A.M. in comparative literature from Harvard University and a B.A. in English and comparative literature from Lehman College. Before coming to the Graduate Center, he taught at Princeton University and Bard College. Although his specialty is in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English, French, and Italian literature, he is especially interested in the theory of the psychological novel (roman d’analyse) across boundaries and eras. In addition to the history of literary theory, he teaches the work of Marcel Proust and the literature of memory and exile.
Aciman is the author of the novels Harvard Square, Call Me by Your Name, and Eight White Nights, the memoir Out of Egypt, and the essay collections False Papers: Essays on Exile and Memory and Alibis: Essays on Elsewhere. He also coauthored and edited The Proust Project and Letters of Transit. His work has appeared in the New York Times, the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, the New Republic, Granta, and the Paris Review, as well as in several volumes of The Best American Essays. He has won a Whiting Writers’ Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a fellowship from the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers. Aciman serves as director of the Writers’ Institute at the Graduate Center and the Center for the Humanities.
André Aciman Has Three New Takes on Love and Loss
June 20, 2025
In "Room on the Sea," the acclaimed writer offers three novellas about love and desire and their sweet or bitter effects.
Andre Aciman headshot and his book cover "Room On The Sea"
André Aciman and his book "Room on the Sea" (Photo credit: Jeannette Montgomery Barron)
A roller coaster of emotions awaits readers this summer with new fiction by Distinguished Professor André Aciman (Comparative Literature, French, Biography and Memoir).
In three novellas coming out this month under the title Room on the Sea, Aciman, the author of the acclaimed novel Call Me by Your Name, returns to themes that have defined his work: the intoxication of love and how the loss of it alters lives.
Aciman explores magical realism in the first story, “The Gentleman from Peru,” about vacationing college friends and their encounter with a hotel guest who reveals a life-altering secret. The title story revolves around the chance meeting of two older New Yorkers serving jury duty in Manhattan, and the third, “Mariana,” is a reimagining of a 17th-century epistolary novel about an affair between a nun and a promiscuous aristocrat.
Aciman, who directs the Writers’ Institute at the Graduate Center, recently reflected on the personal experiences and literary inspirations behind these new works.
You’ve written three novellas that are as much about love as they are about loss and loneliness. What draws you to writing about these experiences?
Aciman: I have experienced loneliness. A lot that comes from being an outsider, in Egypt, in Italy, and even at times here in the U.S.I have also experienced loss in my life, the way everyone has experienced loss of one sort or another: It could be the loss of what I believed was my homeland, or it could be the loss of someone I care for. I have lost both and never recovered, regardless of how time passes. Loss marks one. I wrote about loneliness and loss because these experiences are so deeply inscribed and so unrecoverable, that without them I have no idea who I could be today. I am still trying to resolve these issues.
Can you talk about your writing process? I’m especially curious about the novella “The Gentleman from Peru,” which unfolds like a mystery. Do you begin with a clear plot, or does the story reveal itself as you write?
Aciman: All I knew about “The Gentleman from Peru” is that that at some point the gentleman would put his hand on someone’s shoulder and right away heal every symptom of pain. That is how the story started. Why does he have this gift, how did he come about it, and what effect does curing people have on his own life, all these were issues to be addressed later. I had absolutely no idea how to resolve these questions. But I knew one more thing. I had always wanted to write a story based on magical realism and this was my moment. I wanted to unfetter my fantasy and let it roam as it pleased — and this was my contribution to the genre.
How did your experiences living in New York City influence your writing of “Room on the Sea,” which read to me like a love letter to the city as well as a love story set within it?
Aciman: If you’ve lived in New York City during torrid summer days, you will right away know that what inspired me was the withering heat and the sense that there is no escaping it. But if I wanted to capture how crushing the heat is, I was also trying to arouse in the reader the thrill of a budding romance. There are of course air-conditioned moments; but the Da Pirro Caffè and Caffè Reggio are poorly air conditioned, and the announcer at the court, where my characters meet while waiting to be selected as jurors, is always announcing that the air conditioner is, in his own words, “on the blink.” But then the walk along the High Line, and the running into old-world people who still wander about New York, and the various restaurants around the courthouse that serve Chinese food, all these spell something that none of my characters will want to forget. They are falling in love, but New York as a collaborator is never far behind.
The influences of Emily Brontë and Marcel Proust loom large in “Room on the Sea.” What do you admire about those writers and how have they influenced your work?
Aciman: Strangely it was my father who introduced me to Emily Brontë; it is also my father who told me that I should read Marcel Proust. I was 12 when I read Brontë and barely 15 when he purchased my first novel by Proust. Both taught me something I have never been able to outgrow: that obsessive love is the norm. I have almost always written about the love between two people but what I consider the most powerful form of love is the one you cannot extricate and that sticks to you the way Hercules was finally killed when Deianira gave him a cloak that stuck to his skin and burned him alive. Obsessive love is the kind that burns you up but it has nothing to do with kindness, sympathy, pity, tenderness, or even loyalty. This is why it is consuming. I have known it once only in my life and thank the Lord was able to quell it.
What transfixed you about the story of a Portuguese nun told in the 17th-century novel The Portuguese Letters, which you first read in graduate school and which you retell in “Mariana”?
Aciman: What I will never forget about the Portuguese nun (still called Mariana Alcoforado) was the short novel’s profound psychological acumen. The tale is based on a series of tireless insights woven into each other in a way rarely seen for so early a novel published in 1669. This is not to say that the novel reads like something by Henry James; rather that strong as the plot is, it is always subservient to the way in which humans so often deceive each other and, above all, themselves. Self-deception and double-dealing are the signatories of psychological fiction: Jane Austen, Edith Wharton, Marguerite Yourcenar, and Marguerite de Navarre are themselves champions of this genre. As Virginia Woolf wrote in A Room of One’s Own, women were seldom allowed a room of their own. They wrote in the living room always interrupted but always observing and interpreting people’s motives.
André Aciman
Egypt (b.1951)
André Aciman (born in Alexandria, Egypt) is an American novelist, essayist, memoirist, and leading scholar of the works of Marcel Proust. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, The Paris Review, as well as in several volumes of The Best American Essays. Aciman is the author of the Whiting Award winning memoir Out of Egypt, an account of his childhood as a secular Jew growing up in Egypt during the 1950s and 1960s. He holds a Ph.D. in comparative literature from Harvard University and currently teaches at the Graduate School and University Center of The City University of New York. He previously taught comparative literature at Princeton University, Bard College, and creative writing at New York University.
Genres: Literary Fiction
New and upcoming books
February 2026
thumb
Stowaways
Series
Call Me by Your Name
1. Call Me by Your Name (2007)
2. Find Me (2019)
thumbthumb
Novels
Eight White Nights (2010)
Harvard Square (2013)
The Gentleman From Peru (2024)
thumbthumbthumb
Collections
Enigma Variations (2017)
thumb
Novellas and Short Stories
Mariana (2021)
Stowaways (2026)
thumbthumb
Non fiction hide
Out of Egypt (1994)
Letters of Transit (1999)
False Papers (2000)
Entrez (2001)
Alibis (2011)
The Best American Essays 2020 (2020) (with Robert Atwan)
Homo Irrealis (2021)
Roman Year (2024)
thumbthumbthumbthumb
thumbthumbthumbthumb
Omnibus editions hide
Room on the Sea (2022)
André Aciman
Article
Talk
Read
Edit
View history
Tools
Appearance hide
Text
Small
Standard
Large
Width
Standard
Wide
Color (beta)
Automatic
Light
Dark
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
André Aciman
Aciman in 2017
Aciman in 2017
Born 2 January 1951 (age 74)
Alexandria, Egypt
Occupation
Writerprofessor
Nationality
ItalianAmerican
Education
Lehman College (BA)
Harvard University (MA, PhD)
Period 1995–present
Genre Short story, novel, essay, romance
Notable work Call Me by Your Name (2007)
Spouse Susan Wiviott
Children 3, including Alexander
Signature
André Aciman (/ˈæsɪmən/;[1] born 2 January 1951) is an Italian-American writer. Born and raised in Alexandria, Egypt, he is currently a distinguished professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, where he teaches the history of literary theory and the works of Marcel Proust.[2][3] Aciman previously taught creative writing at New York University and French literature at Princeton University and Bard College.[4][5][6]
In 2009, he was Visiting Distinguished Writer at Wesleyan University.[7][8][9]
He has authored several novels, including Call Me by Your Name (winner of the 2007 Lambda Literary Award[10] for gay fiction), which was made into a film, and the 1995 memoir Out of Egypt, which won a Whiting Award.[11] Though best known for Call Me by Your Name,[12] Aciman said in a 2019 interview that he views the novel Eight White Nights as his best book.[13]
Early life and education
This section of a biography of a living person needs additional citations for verification. Please help by adding reliable sources. Contentious material about living persons that is unsourced or poorly sourced must be removed immediately from the article and its talk page, especially if potentially libelous.
Find sources: "André Aciman" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (March 2018) (Learn how and when to remove this message)
Aciman was born in Alexandria, Egypt, the son of Regine and Henri N. Aciman, who owned a knitting factory.[14][15][16][17] His mother was deaf.[18] Aciman was raised in a largely French-speaking home, where family members also spoke Italian, Greek, Ladino, and Arabic.[5]
His parents were Sephardic Jews of Turkish and Italian origin from families that had settled in Alexandria in 1905 (Turkish surname: Acıman).[6] Considered part of the Mutamassirun ("foreign") community, his family members were unable to become Egyptian citizens. As a child, Aciman mistakenly believed that he was a French citizen.[19] He attended British schools in Egypt.[13] While the family was spared the 1956–57 exodus and expulsions from Egypt, increased tensions with Israel under President Gamal Abdel Nasser put Jews in a precarious position, leading his family to leave Egypt nine years later, in 1965.[20]
After his father purchased Italian citizenship for the family, Aciman moved with his mother and brother as refugees to Rome while his father moved to Paris. They moved to New York City in 1968.[5] He earned a B.A. in English and Comparative Literature from Lehman College in 1973, and an M.A. and PhD in Comparative Literature from Harvard University in 1988.[21]
Out of Egypt
Aciman's 1996 memoir Out of Egypt, about Alexandria before the 1956 expulsions from Egypt, was reviewed widely.[22][23][24] In The New York Times, Michiko Kakutani described the book as a "remarkable memoir...that leaves the reader with a mesmerizing portrait of a now vanished world." She compared his work with that of Lawrence Durrell and noted, "There are some wonderfully vivid scenes here, as strange and marvelous as something in García Márquez."
Personal life
Aciman is married to Susan Wiviott. They have three sons, Alexander, a writer and journalist, and twins Philip and Michael.[25][26] His wife, a graduate of University of Wisconsin–Madison and Harvard Law School, is the CEO of the Bridge, Inc., a New York City-based nonprofit organization that offers rehabilitative services. She is also a board director of Kadmon Holdings, Inc., and formerly worked as Chief Program Officer of Palladia and Deputy Executive Vice President of JBFCS.[27][28][29][30][31][32][33]
Awards
1995 Whiting Award
2007 Lambda Literary Award
Bibliography
This list is incomplete; you can help by adding missing items. (May 2018)
Luca Guadagnino and Aciman at a screening of Call Me by Your Name, at the 2017 Berlin International Film Festival
Novels
Call Me by Your Name (2007)[34][35][36]
Eight White Nights (2010)
Harvard Square (2013)
Enigma Variations (2017)
Find Me (2019)[37]
The Gentleman from Peru (2024)
Room on the Sea (2025)
Short fiction
"Cat's Cradle". The New Yorker. November 1997.
"Monsieur Kalashnikov". The Paris Review. 181. Summer 2007.
"Abingdon Square". Granta. 122 (Betrayal). January 2013.
Non-fiction
Out of Egypt (memoir) (1995)[2][3]
Letters of Transit: Reflections on Exile, Identity, Language, and Loss (editor/contributor) (1999)
False Papers: Essays on Exile and Memory (2000)[2][3]
Entrez: Signs of France (with Steven Rothfeld) (2001)
The Proust Project (editor) (2004)[2][38]
The Light of New York (with Jean-Michel Berts) (2007)
Alibis: Essays on Elsewhere (2011)
Homo Irrealis: Essays (2021)[39]
Aciman, André (22 October 2024). Roman Year. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ISBN 978-0-374-61338-9.[40][41][42]
Selected articles
"Reflections of an Uncertain Jew". The Threepenny Review. 81. Spring 2000.
"The Exodus Obama Forgot to Mention". Opinion. The New York Times. 8 June 2009.
"Are You Listening? Conversations with my deaf mother". Personal History. The New Yorker. 17 March 2014.
"W. G. Sebald and the Emigrants". The New Yorker. 25 August 2016.
"André Aciman Would Like to Demote Virginia Woolf From the Canon". By the Book. The New York Times. 31 October 2019.
Aciman, Andre FIND ME Farrar, Straus and Giroux (Adult Fiction) $27.00 10, 29 ISBN: 978-0-374-15501-8
Aciman (Eight White Nights, 2010, etc.) picks up the storyline of his best-known novel to trace the lives of its actors 20 years on.
In Aciman's breakthrough novel, Call Me By Your Name, the young protagonist, Elio, is reassured by his father that there's no wrong or shame in loving another man--in this instance, a visiting American named Oliver. In this sequel, Sami, the father, is the man freshly in love, 10 years later. Southbound for Rome on a train that takes forever to arrive, he falls into easy, sometimes-teasing conversation with young Miranda, who cuts to the chase after a few dozen pages by saying, "When was the last time you were with a girl my age who's not exactly ugly and who is desperately trying to tell you something that should have been quite obvious by now." Indeed, and love blossoms, complete with intellectual repartee with Miranda's bookish, sophisticated father. Fathers indeed loom large in Aciman's tale: Though sometimes far from the scene, they reverberate, as with the father of Michel, an older man to whom Elio becomes attached in the second part of the novel. Does he miss his late father, Elio asks, to which Michel replies, "Miss him? Not really. Maybe because, unlike my mother who died eight years ago, he never really died for me. He's just absent." Of a philosophical bent, Michel ponders wisely on the differences between his younger and older selves, prompting Elio to recall his one great love. Somehow, perhaps not entirely believably, Oliver, well established back home in the States, receives that brainwave ("It's me, isn't it, it's me you're looking for…"), for, with quiet regrets, he ends a long marriage and makes his way back into the past--the future, that is--to find Elio once again. Aciman blends assuredly mature themes with deep learning in which the likes of Bach and Cavafy and several languages grace the proceedings, and his story is touching without being sentimental even if some of it is too neatly inevitable.
An elegant, memorable story of enduring love across the generations.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
"Aciman, Andre: FIND ME." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Aug. 2019. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A596269933/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=4ab490bb. Accessed 16 Oct. 2025.
Find Me
Andre Aciman. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $27 (272p) ISBN 978-0-374-15501-8
The elegant sequel to Aciman's celebrated first novel, Call Me by Your Name, revisits his best-known characters some 20 years later. The story opens as Samuel, a classics professor who has abandoned hope of love, boards the train from Florence to Rome to visit his pianist son, Elio, the earlier novel's narrator. On the train, Samuel strikes up a conversation with a beautiful photographer named Miranda, an American expatriate like him, though she's half his age. In dialogue that quickly turns searching, they sense in each other a soul mate ("I've known you for less than an hour on a train. Yet you totally understand me"); later that day, once they arrive in Rome, they begin planning new lives together. Several years later, Elio has moved to Paris. He begins a satisfying relationship with Michael, an attorney two decades or so his senior, but Elio's memories of Oliver, whom he loved and lost as a teen, reawaken. A third segment focuses on Oliver, now a married father yet unable to leave the past and its passion behind, before Elio and Oliver meet again in the novel's brief coda. Elio is the heart of the novel, as its core themes--including fatherhood, music, the nature of time and fate, the weight and promise of the past--are infused with eroticism, nostalgia, and tenderness in fluid prose. The novel again demonstrates Aciman's capacity to fuse the sensual and the cerebral in stories that touch the heart. Agent: Lynn Nesbit, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc. (Oct.)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
"Find Me." Publishers Weekly, vol. 266, no. 34, 26 Aug. 2019, p. 89. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A598538052/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=09ac81a5. Accessed 16 Oct. 2025.
* Find Me. By Andre Aciman. Oct. 2019. 272p. Farrar, $27 (9780374155018).
Set some 20 years after Aciman's novel Call Me by Your Name (2007), the inspiration for the acclaimed motion picture of the same title, this sometimes-elegiac sequel finds Elio now a celebrated classical pianist and Oliver an academic. To find out more about them, readers will have to be patient, though, for nearly the first half of the novel is given to Samuel, Elio's father, who meets a young woman half his age on a train from Florence to Rome, and the two quickly fall in love. Their relationship is echoed in the second of the novel's four movements in Elio's meeting a man, Michel, twice his age and falling in love. When we meet Oliver, he is hosting a party at his New York apartment. At the party are two young people, Paul and Erica, with whom Oliver is infatuated. Their leaving the party is an invitation for his melancholy meditation on love and the past, and it turns out that Oliver has been miserable for 20 years over his breakup with Elio, even though he was the one who ended the relationship. Will he have the inclination and energy to act on this? Call Me By Your Name was widely praised for its treatment of the nature of love, a theme that Find Me continues with subtlety and grace. Its treatment of the characters' psychology is astute and insightful, but what will ultimately drive reader interest is the question of whether star-crossed lovers Elio and Oliver will reunite. One can only hope.--Michael Cart
YA: Teen fans of the film adaptation of Call Me by Your Name won't want to miss this. MC.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
Cart, Michael. "Find Me." Booklist, vol. 116, no. 1, 1 Sept. 2019, pp. 46+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A601763554/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=4d57effa. Accessed 16 Oct. 2025.
FIND ME By Andre Aciman
It is very difficult for any sequel to please everyone, the devotees of the original all clamoring for their various fantasies for the central characters. And this challenge is only compounded when that original has been adapted into a hugely successful film, the sort that spawns a flood of think pieces, viral memes and illustrated tributes.
Such is certainly the case for the sequel to Andre Aciman's 2007 novel, ''Call Me by Your Name,'' the source material for the Oscar-nominated 2017 Luca Guadagnino film, which starred Timothee Chalamet falling for Armie Hammer in the lush Italian countryside and inspired a new wave of readership for the decade-old novel. (Feel free to Google ''Elio and Oliver peach scene'' to get a sense of the obsession.)
The structure of Aciman's sequel, ''Find Me,'' is likely to disappoint those who've been eagerly waiting to find out what has become of Elio, the earnest teenage piano prodigy, and his summer guest, Oliver, an older, strapping American philosophy student of his father's. The first half of the new book concerns neither of these two lovers, and is told entirely from the perspective of Elio's now-divorced father, Samuel, as he finds himself infatuated with a much younger woman he meets on a train.
Aciman has already demonstrated his skill at portraying the terrifying and overwhelming experience of a romantic crush -- the lust and violence and unease of it all -- and this first section reminded me of a different European-set film, ''Before Sunrise,'' as Miranda and Sami wander around Rome deep in conversation, sharing stories and secrets. But even with the discomforting dynamic of their age difference, it's hard to read this section without feeling impatient for our leading men to take the stage.
As for Elio and Oliver: The book's second half picks up 15 years after we left them, each narrating his own section in the first person. Given the intensity of their past-life romance, it's surprising that Aciman decides to keep the two separated for almost the entire novel: Elio living in Paris and embarking on a relationship with a sensitive and much older Frenchman, Oliver toiling away in New York City, unhappily married to a woman, with whom he has two sons.
Will Elio and Oliver eventually find their way back to each other? Or are they destined never to cross paths again, forever pining over the long-ago bond that bled one's identity into the other's? In Oliver's words, ''Waiting up is what we've done all our lives, waiting up allows me to stand here ... at my end of our planet ... for all I want is to think of you, and sometimes I don't know who's the one thinking, you or I.'' His melodramatic anguish is echoed in Aciman's swing at an emotionally satisfying conclusion.
''Call Me by Your Name,'' the bulk of which takes place over the course of a few summer weeks, offered a visceral depiction of the all-encompassing and transformative properties of falling in love. ''Find Me,'' by contrast, turns its focus on the comedown, the second acts. It is a lyrical meditation on being forced to move to another location after the party's over, on the Sisyphean task of trying to replicate the magic of young passion. ''We're not going to feed off the past, are we?'' Oliver asks toward the end of the novel, and this question can almost be read as Aciman's meta-commentary on the existence of ''Find Me'' itself. As much as we all may have craved 300 more pages of vivid descriptions of Oliver and Elio, together once more and vacillating between the throes of lust and torment, instead we are given a book that explores what can happen when your life gets away from you, when you realize just how much time you've wasted. It may not make for the stuff of glistening cinema, but it strikes an affectingly melancholy chord.
Josh Duboff is a writer and screenwriter. He was previously a senior writer at Vanity Fair. FIND ME By Andre Aciman 260 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $27.
CAPTION(S):
PHOTO: (PHOTOGRAPH BY Ka Young Lee FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
Duboff, Josh. "Lost and Found." The New York Times Book Review, 15 Dec. 2019, p. 17(L). Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A608671939/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=286b5317. Accessed 16 Oct. 2025.
The Best American Essays, 2020. Ed. by Andre Aciman and Robert Atwan. Nov. 2020.336p. HMH, paper, $16.99 (9780358359913); e-book, $16.99 (9780358358589). 814.
The deadline for submissions to The Best American Essays in any given year is February first, so all of this year's material was written well before either the COVID-19 pandemic or recent Black Lives Matter protests. Despite this, the topics of many of these 24 essays seem strangely prescient: memories of a different epidemic, AIDS; the story of an elderly parent dying while away from family members; photos emphasizing racial profiling, white imperialism, bigotry, ignorance, and the isolation of solitary strangers. Bits of humor and kindness soften the harsh realities described in some accounts, and there are stories of acceptance, growth, and increased wisdom. Then there are the standalones, essays with topics ranging from Susan Sontag to Paleolithic cave figures to Leopold and Loeb to the Holocaust, which fold in snapshots of poetry, art criticism, philosophy, Shakespeare, and horror movies. As with previous series entries, this book's diverse array of subjects and authors represented, combined with its consistently strong writing and timely references to contemporary issues, makes for a compelling collection that should appeal widely. --Kathleen McBroom
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2020 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
McBroom, Kathleen. "The Best American Essays, 2020." Booklist, vol. 117, no. 4, 15 Oct. 2020, pp. 7+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A639876054/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=ec4a0327. Accessed 16 Oct. 2025.
Aciman, André HOMO IRREALIS Farrar, Straus and Giroux (NonFiction None) $27.00 1, 19 ISBN: 978-0-374-17187-2
Urbane essays in pursuit of a self.
Reprising themes he explored in his most recent collection of nonfiction, Alibis (2011), novelist, memoirist, and cultural critic Aciman, at 70, offers elegant meditations on time and memory, longing and desire, being and becoming. Whether writing about his childhood in Alexandria, visiting Rome with Freud’s ghostly presence, searching for Dostoevsky’s 19th-century milieu in St. Petersburg, reading Proust, or watching Éric Rohmer’s movies, Aciman finds himself “caught between remembrance and anticipated memory.” The feeling is a swirl of moods he calls “irrealist,” where “boundaries between what is and what isn’t, between what happened and what won’t,” disappear, and where “what might never, couldn’t, shouldn’t, wouldn’t possibly occur” may well happen. Nostalgia imbues many essays with ruefulness, if not regret. In Rome, he discovered “the birthplace of a self I wished to be one day and should have been but never was and left behind and didn’t do a thing to nurse back to life again.” All of us, he writes, “seek a life that exists elsewhere in time, or elsewhere on-screen, and that, not being able to find it, we have all learned to make do with what life throws our way.” Past and present, for him, are “continuously coincident,” and memories that have apparently vanished continue to exert their presence. Those memories include encounters with works of art—John Sloan’s portraits of New York in the 1920s, Monet’s Poppy Field, the “muted lyricism” of Corot’s French landscapes—that hover enticingly in his imagination. Art, writes Aciman, “sees footprints, not feet, luster, not light, hears resonance, not sound. Art is about our love of things when we know it’s not the things themselves we love.” Reminiscent of the writings of W.G. Sebald and Fernando Pessoa (both subjects of his essays), Aciman’s latest conveys with grace and insight his longing to apprehend “myself looking out to the self I am today.”
A resplendent collection from a writer who never disappoints.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2021 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
"Aciman, Andre: HOMO IRREALIS." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Apr. 2021. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A656696641/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=c88c045c. Accessed 16 Oct. 2025.
Roman Year: A Memoir by Andre Aciman; Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 368 pp., $30
Andre Aciman's introduction to Italy was a nightmare. His first memoir, Out of Egypt (1994), describes how a prosperous, sophisticated Turkish-Jewish family was forced out of Alexandria in the mid-20th century by President Gamal Abdel Nasser's campaign to rid Egypt of "Egyptianized" foreign nationals. In the years between 1952 and 1970--from the anticolonial coup that brought Nasser to power, through the Suez Crisis of 1956 that brought the waterway under Egyptian control, to the aftermath of the 1967 war with Israel-- Alexandria, the great capital city founded by Alexander the Great in 331 BCE, lost most of the people who ensured its immemorial mix of cultures, languages, and religions. Alexandrians with Greek, Italian, English, Maltese, French, Jewish, and Armenian connections, identified broadly as "European" and "Western," fled increasingly restrictive educational and economic policies--some with foresight, and others, like the Acimans, only after their situation had deteriorated beyond repair. By the time the 15-year-old Andre, his younger brother, and their mother boarded a ship from Alexandria to Naples in 1966, only two members of the extensive clan remained in Egypt: the boys' father and their aunt Elsa, who decamped not long afterward to Paris. Nasser's punitive financial policies--made worse by the bad faith of the agents who helped the Acimans spirit their savings abroad--left the deaf mother and her two boys destitute, dependent for survival on their relatives in Italy. Roman Year begins as their ship pulls into Naples, and their uncle Claude, now known as Claudio, negotiates the trio's way out of a Neapolitan refugee camp.
Aciman remembers the ride from Naples to Rome, where Uncle Claude has offered to lease them an apartment, as "the worst hour of my life." The volatile uncle loses his way in Naples, stops to ask directions of a traffic cop (vigile) in Italian, and then loses his temper in blood-curdling French, no doubt with some Turkish expletives thrown in:
But on reaching an uphill crossroads ... and not finding ... the
directions in any way fathomable, [he] banged both hands on the
steering wheel and began shouting, first at the car, then at
Naples, which he called a befouled hole filled with urchins and
criminals, then let out his fury on the three of us. I was a
complete imbecile, he said, with a fourth-grade knowledge of
Italian, my brother a simpering toad who might as well be deaf like
his mother, and finally my mother, who should have tried a bit
harder to help him with directions but naturally couldn't
understand a word because her illiterate parents had put her in the
care of a witch doctor who made sure to keep her a deaf-and-dumb
mutant condemned to deaf-dumbness for the rest of her deplorable
meaningless life.
When Aciman points out that Uncle Claude has driven in the opposite direction from the one suggested by the vigile, the volatile man erupts again, railing against "failures, imbeciles, and that holy idiot--me."
The apartment turns out to be a walkup on Via Clelia, a side street of the ancient Via Tuscolana, which still leads to the hillside resort town where Cicero famously owned a villa. But in 1966, the poor, working-class neighborhood was a vision straight out of Pasolini: a Fascist-era tenement built to house the people displaced by Mussolini's archaeological excavations and urban renewal programs, carefully sited far enough away from Rome's city center to deter any would-be demonstrators. The boys quickly discover that, until they moved into it, their new home had been a brothel.
Eventually, mother and sons board the bus, number 85, that leads from their forsaken outpost into the historical heart of Rome, and the Eternal City casts its spell. Twelve years after the Aciman boys, I commuted aboard the same smelly rattletrap along its enchanted route: past the Colosseum, past the ruddy bricks and grubby white marble of the Forum, past the Emperor Augustus's colossal Temple of Mars the Avenger, past the marble column carved with the exploits of Emperor Trajan, past the immense marble pile of the King Victor Emmanuel II monument (in those days known as "the typewriter"), past the Renaissance Palazzo Venezia (Mussolini's former office), past the Baroque facade of San Marcello: an incomparable journey despite the discomforts that rooted it in the all-too-human present. Rome's beauties of golden light, deep culture, greenery, and glorious monuments clearly helped to heal, but also to sharpen, the loss of everything that was Alexandria for the brothers Aciman. So, too, the very roughness and uncertainty of life on Via Clelia, its grinding awfulness and its flashes of beauty, evidently transformed this perpetually displaced teenage refugee into a writer who has become a consummate poet of sublime, fugitive moments.
Aciman suggests (though not in these exact words) that in many ways, Uncle Claude's epithet "holy idiot" stuck with him for life. As a Jew of the diaspora, as the child of a deaf woman (who was also a proficient lip-reader), as a refugee from storied Alexandria, he experienced language, place, family, education, sexuality, wealth and poverty, beauty and ugliness in complicated mixtures that have given his writing its poignancy and its versatility, not to mention flashes of wicked humor. Uncle Claude gets his comeuppance when his two nephews notice that he is wearing nothing beneath his wide-legged shorts. The description of what they see on unintentional display is a vendetta as delightful for the reader of this remarkable memoir as the sight itself must have been for the beholders.
Permission required for reprinting, reproducing, or other uses.
Tngrid D. Rowland is a professor in the Department of History at the University of Notre Dame. Her many books include The Culture of the High Renaissance, From Pompeii: The Afterlife of a Roman Town, and the forthcoming Lies of the Artists.
Caption: Thomas Hawk/Flickr
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 Phi Beta Kappa Society
http://www.theamericanscholar.org/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
Rowland, Ingrid D. "A Stranger in the Seven Hills: A refugee's experience in the Eternal City." The American Scholar, vol. 93, no. 4, autumn 2024, p. NA(NA). Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A813056934/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=e3055672. Accessed 16 Oct. 2025.
Andre Aciman was born in Alexandria, Egypt in 1951. He is a professor of comparative literature and a best-selling author, known for his novel Call Me by Your Name.
Who are your heroes?
Tintin was loyal, forthright, honest and just. But even as a child I thought he lacked a sense of humour. My adult hero is Marcus Aurelius: a great emperor and a philosopher. He excelled in ruling and in leaving us a book everyone must read.
What's your earliest memory?
My four grandparents lived across the street from each other. When I was two my grandfather died. No one said he was dead but I kept asking why we couldn't go visit him. Not a word from anyone until my mother had enough with everyone's insidious tales and simply told me the truth. I can still recall the street and the cast of the late morning light as I struggled to grasp what dying meant.
What book last changed your thinking?
Fernando Pessoa's The Book of Disquiet, where an author I discovered very late in life proves that what guides our understanding of everything is paradox, that one can coexist with both sides of an equation and not feel the call to resolve the contradiction.
What would be your "Mastermind" specialist subject?
Marcel Proust. I teach a graduate seminar on Proust every two years, and he is the author who has influenced me most: his way of thinking about people and their sinuous turns, about great events and far, far lesser ones, about beauty, and ultimately about writing and style. One might as well say of Proust what others have said of Aristotle: You run into Proust coming back from where you're still headed.
In which time and place, other than your own, would you like to live?
Possibly Bordighera in its heyday at the very start of the 20th century. Bordighera faces the Mediterranean and is a beautiful old town. It's where you realise that not lacking anything and not even being able to think of wanting anything more is the ultimate definition of pleasure.
What's the best piece of advice you've ever received?
"Be yourself!" No one really knows who they are, it's something we're constantly trying to figure out, and can spend our whole lives exploring. The act of being oneself is, at best, an approximation. A performance of who we think we might be. I would have rather been told to be honest with myself. That's advice we should all follow.
What's currently bugging you?
I'm a restless person with a constant itch to try something new. But I never quite know what that new thing is, or what will scratch that itch. A new city, a new book, a new language? The endless searching is what bugs me. That and the leaf blowing that my building does every Monday and Friday right outside my window.
What single thing would make your life better?
Security.
When were you happiest?
When I had all my three very, very young children glued to the TV watching Tosca and Pagliacci. I feared this might not last but I relished those moments.
In another life, what job might you have chosen?
If I had the capacity, I would have liked to work in finance. I've always been fascinated by people who understand the stock market and the economy so inherently. But I lack these skills. I can only write. And to be honest, I am not always skilful as a writer.
Are we all doomed?
Humanity as a whole? I don't think it is doomed. Each of us individually? Maybe.
Andre Aciman's "My Roman Year" is published by Faber & Faber. "An Evening with Andre Aciman" will take place on14 October at Foyles bookshop in central London
By New Statesman
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 New Statesman, Ltd.
http://www.newstatesman.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
"Andre Aciman Q&A: 'No one really knows who they are': The author and director on Marcel Proust and his fascination with the stock market." New Statesman, vol. 153, no. 5784, 11 Oct. 2024. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A834272202/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=c0e3ccdd. Accessed 16 Oct. 2025.
Recounting the time his family spent in a former Italian brothel, André Aciman's new memoir, ''Roman Year,'' picks up where 1994's ''Out of Egypt'' left off.
ROMAN YEAR: A Memoir, by André Aciman
About a third of the way through André Aciman's ''Roman Year'' -- an account of the time his family spent there when he was 16, exiled from his native Egypt for being Jewish -- an uncle visits from New York, looks around the former brothel that is the Acimans' new apartment and immediately urges them to move to America. ''I wonder why it had never occurred to me,'' Aciman writes, ''or for that matter to either of my parents, that ours was not a life.'' At its heart, this memoir is a search for that life from the limbo of dislocation.
In the 1950s and '60s, Egypt's president Gamal Abdel Nasser set about expelling Jews and confiscating their property, including Aciman's father's fabric-dyeing factory. Arriving in Naples by ship in 1966, Aciman, his mother and brother are saved from the refugee camp by the ill-tempered and miserly Uncle Claude, who rents them the space he once ran as a ''home for prostitutes.'' (Aciman's father remains in Alexandria, and their already fraught marriage soon dissolves.) The family's geographical shift comes with a corresponding class one: from wealthy elite to poor refugees.
''Roman Year'' picks up where Aciman's 1994 memoir, ''Out of Egypt,'' left off: That book chronicled his family's life in Alexandria before their exile, interweaving personal history with the postwar political climate. Here Aciman, the author of ''Call Me by Your Name,'' describes the emotional toll of adapting to a new place while having to plan for the future you haven't begun to imagine: ''I knew huge changes had occurred but I couldn't quantify them, much less fathom their reach.''
Central to this adaptation, and to Aciman's evolving identity, is language. His family has fled so many wars and pogroms, has rebuilt their lives so many times, that between them they speak French, Arabic, Greek, Turkish, German, Italian and Ladino (the language of Sephardic Jews). His Aunt Flora, who was displaced from Germany first and then from Egypt, and lost her worldly goods each time, ''taught me to see that we didn't have one lifetime, or only one identity; and not only two, but three, four, five simultaneous ones.''
Raised speaking French in Alexandria, Aciman feels a sense of belonging when he visits his father in Paris, where he has settled after finally leaving Egypt. But the boy's comfort is quickly shattered when a stranger comments on the foreign accent he did not know he had. ''As a young man who thought he was French and was finally in his language, in his homeland, and savoring budding manhood in, of all places, Paris, I was hurled into a universe of domestics.''
For his deaf mother, language is both a barrier and an entryway: ''Italians, being a people whose language is sketched on their faces and hands, were easy to understand, as she was for them.'' In Rome she finds a new independence, while Aciman's outgoing and pragmatic brother also adapts to their new reality. Meanwhile a listless Aciman loses himself in books and films, feeling that both he and his father have lost not just their country but ''our trust in the world.''
Aciman evokes the passing of time in rich, meandering prose, rebuilding 1960s Rome in sentences suffused with light and sound and memories -- the taste of an artichoke, the smell of bergamot and of Crêpe de Chine perfume. From the bewilderment of arrival, the young Aciman moves through denial toward a gradual acceptance of his new life. ''Roman Year'' is both an affecting coming-of-age story and a timely, distinctive description of the haunted lives of refugees.
ROMAN YEAR: A Memoir | By André Aciman | Farrar, Straus & Giroux | 354 pp. | $30
CAPTION(S):
PHOTO This article appeared in print on page BR16.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
Forna, Aminatta. "Exodus." The New York Times Book Review, 17 Nov. 2024, p. 16. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A816374217/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=b99d0be1. Accessed 16 Oct. 2025.
When he was a teenager, Aciman's family was turned out of Egypt and landed in Italy. In a beguiling new memoir, ''Roman Year,'' he revisits a lost era.
Give André Aciman a piece of fruit, and he will tell you a story. His 2007 debut novel, ''Call Me By Your Name,'' famously made great erotic hay of a peach -- a proxy object of lust for his yearning teenage protagonist, ripe with juicy metaphor.
And in ''Roman Year,'' a new memoir about his own tender youth, Aciman writes lyrically of his first whiff of bergamot in a crowded Italian marketplace: ''I pierced the rind with a fingernail, just the tiniest gash, and out came a powerful scent that I was reluctant to decide whether I liked or not but which cast a spell all its own on the morning and the city, as if this was what the city smelled like, or this was how I wanted to define its smell and was trapping its memory for who knew how many years.''
Like that dimpled citrus, fragrant but inedible, Rome proved bittersweet for the Alexandria-born, New York-based writer, now 73. Aciman's family, Sephardic Jews who were expelled from Spain around the 16th century and eventually came to settle in Egypt, were displaced again in the wake of President Gamal Abdel Nasser's nationalist policies, fleeing to the Eternal City in 1965. (Much of that tangled history is recounted in ''Out of Egypt,'' a nonfiction portrait of Aciman's earliest years published in 1994.)
The Italy of that era tends to invoke cinematic visions of Sophia Loren and Federico Fellini. The reality, though, felt far from la dolce vita for Aciman when he landed in a refugee camp in Naples at 14, with his younger brother and his mother, who had lost her hearing in infancy to meningitis.
''Being a teenager is very tumultuous -- that goes without saying,'' Aciman said by phone from Genoa, Italy, where he was promoting the book's European release. ''But I was the oldest among the two kids, and my mother was deaf and mute. So essentially, I had to be in the role of the person who translates everything. And we were very, very penniless except for the kindness of an uncle who decided to help us, but with a terrible attitude.''
That would be Uncle Claude, a mercurial figure who looms large in ''Roman Year,'' both bestowing and demanding irregular favors from his younger, poorer relatives. (Even the three-bedroom apartment Claude offers them with showy hospitality, they soon realize, had recently served as a sort of makeshift brothel -- hence the half-outfitted kitchen and the constant calls from strangers looking for ''secretarial'' help.)
Aciman's parents' marriage was a stormy one, and with his father off tending to business in Alexandria and later Paris -- as much out of need, perhaps, as out of strategic avoidance of his high-spirited wife -- the trio were largely left to find their way in a vast, indifferent city. His brother slipped with relative ease into adolescent friendships with neighbors and schoolmates, and even his mother, a temperamental beauty who understood ''not a word of Italian,'' found myriad ways to integrate herself into the local hearing and deaf communities.
For Aciman, though, a life of the mind became a way of shutting out a place he found alienating and often ugly. Wracked with shame over his family's relative poverty, his foreign accent and his faith, however tenuously observed -- ''we were not good Jews, just by definition,'' he said, of a secular lifestyle that included ham sandwiches and Christmas holidays -- he withdrew into Proust and Kafka.
''I was the one who basically shut myself in and read books all day without even opening the shutters, so I wouldn't have to see,'' he said. ''But eventually, gradually, despite myself almost, I began to love a particular neighborhood -- which is not the ancient Rome so much as the Renaissance Rome, the baroque Rome. Yes, you think of Fellini and the Vatican and the Colosseum. But those didn't touch me as much as wandering those streets.''
So when he wasn't attending classes at his international high school, Aciman would roam, with a book or a bicycle or sometimes just a few coins in his pocket for a warm cornetto. And because he was a teenager -- belying its title, the timeline in ''Roman Year'' carries through to approximately 1968 -- he began to fall in love with love, too, or at least open himself up to the romantic possibilities of his new home.
There is a memorable section in the book, which grows increasingly intimate and poetic in its second half, in which Aciman nurtures crushes on both a local schoolgirl and a boy who works in the market, even as he begins a clandestine affair with a 33-year-old seamstress named Paola.
That sensual awakening, and the breadth of its targets, is something that Aciman, who shares three grown sons with Susan Wiviott, his wife of more than 30 years, seems to embrace with unusual openness and candor.
''I identify as straight, but when I wrote 'Call Me By Your Name,' I just put something that made perfect sense to me,'' he said of the novel's swooning same-sex romance, which went on to become an Oscar-winning film in 2017 and helped make a movie star of the young actor Timothée Chalamet. ''Many writers I know write about what is real, and I applaud them. I'm more interested in what is true.''
Jonathan Galassi, Aciman's editor of many years (he also oversees the work of Alice McDermott, Jonathan Franzen and Marilynne Robinson, among others) put it another way: ''People have become very alert to André's way of talking about feelings, which is a little more fluid than a lot of writers.''
That fluidity, Galassi said, is part of his appeal. ''He gives readers permission to be ambivalent. Part of his whole ethos is about being an outsider -- he was a Jew in Egypt, he was an Egyptian in Italy, and then he was a European in America. So he's always at a certain angle to experience.''
Aciman has a particular phrase for that in the book: ''We were elsewhere people,'' he writes of a family diaspora whose perpetual unrootedness came, eventually, to feel less like a circumstance than a state of being. Even their way of communicating with one another -- in a polyglot stew of French, Italian, Arabic and English -- tended to operate outside of linguistic and geographic borders.
''People have asked me 'What language do you dream in?''' he said. ''And I don't even know. I would love to say I speak in English or I think in French. My mother tongue is French, and I love speaking Italian. But at the same time, I wouldn't dare write anything in French, but I do dare to write in English.''
He is ambivalent, though, about the idea that his personal history has given him some kind of literary skeleton key. ''It sounds feasible to say that the more languages you know, the more words you have, and the more you can convey,'' he went on. ''But I still don't know if having so many languages and being exposed to so many cultures has in any way enriched me. If anything, it's done the opposite. It's made me insecure about everything.''
''Roman Year'' ends with its gaze turned toward New York City, where Aciman would go on to get a degree at Lehman College in the Bronx. (He later earned a Masters and Ph.D. from Harvard before returning to New York, where he is now a professor of Comparative Literature at the CUNY Graduate Center and the director of the Writer's Institute there).
After roughly half a century in the melting pot of Manhattan, has Aciman learned to recognize a fellow ''elsewhere'' type in a crowd?
''Well, here's the catch,'' he said. ''Everybody is an elsewhere person. We're always floating between the subjunctive and the conditional, the future and the past. The moments when I have lived in the present are very, very few. And I think that's what writing is ultimately all about. Basically, it builds you a home that's not an elsewhere, even though it will claim to be an elsewhere. And that is the best home that exists.''
CAPTION(S):
PHOTOS: Opposite page: André Aciman in 2024. (PHOTOGRAPH BY TOM JAMIESON FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES) (BR36); From top: Aciman, with his great-uncle Claude, who welcomed them to Rome; Aciman and his brother sit next to their mother. (PHOTOGRAPHS VIA ANDRÐ ACIMAN) (BR37) This article appeared in print on page BR36, BR37.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
Greenblatt, Leah. "Learning to Live in Exile." The New York Times Book Review, 8 Dec. 2024, p. 36. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A819221026/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=3a3d0592. Accessed 16 Oct. 2025.
As of this writing, more than half a million people have already passed through the "Holy Door" at St. Peter's Basilica in Rome in honor of this year's Jubilee of Hope. Rome is, as a result, flooded with tourists, and as my colleague Gerard O'Connell reports, the torrent is not expected to end anytime soon.
Jaded travelers might be forgiven for crossing Rome off their destination list this year. Luckily, we have a new book from the novelist and memoirist Andre Aciman chronicling his formative year in Rome as a teenager. If you don't want to travel to Rome, try Roman Year instead.
Aciman is perhaps most well-known for writing the novel Call Me By Your Name, which became a popular film directed by Luca Guadagnino and starring Timothee Chalamet. I also had the good fortune to take a class from Professor Aciman in college (though we have not been in touch since). The subject was Proust, and as his new memoir reveals, he remains a Proustian at heart.
Aciman's earlier memoir, Out of Egypt, chronicled his family's life in Alexandria over three generations. As Jewish emigres in Egypt, they were never given full citizenship and were forced to leave when political tensions escalated under President Gamal Abdel Nasser. And so, in 1966, they landed in Rome, where they had relatives and where his father, who worked in textiles, hoped to find a job.
His father did not join them at first, so it was left to his mother, who was deaf, to parent two teenage sons alone. The family did have relatives in Rome, notably Uncle Claude, who loved the city and who told them that "one needed more than one lifetime" to enjoy it. "No nostalgia, please," he advised his family. "If you have any regrets, it's that you should have left Egypt sooner."
The family lived in an apartment on Via Clelia, far from the neighborhoods that Aciman hoped to explore. "I wanted the Rome of movies, of grand monuments, of beautiful women turning their heads to smile at young men my age," Aciman writes. "But that Rome was nowhere in sight, maybe never existed. Instead, this was black-and-white Rome, like the films shot in Rome in the mid-fifties and early sixties."
Still, Rome comes alive in these pages: the televisions that played loudly from his neighbors' windows; the street vendors who began setting up before dawn; the two local prostitutes working out of a storefront. This may not be the Rome of Rick Steves, but it is true to one boy's experience at a particular moment in time. And any great city has thousands of stories to tell.
Slowly, Aciman starts to explore his new home. His family enrolls him in a school across town, which requires a long morning bus ride. He hates it at first, but his commute allows him to see a different Rome, and he warms to its charms. After school, before he boards the bus for home, he lets himself wander: "It was during those evenings as I strolled along its streets that Rome came to mean something as uncharted and intangible as desire itself." (The New Yorker has dubbed Aciman a "grammarian of desire"; I'd love to see that on a business card.)
Aciman's favorite part of the city was the centro storico, where the city's eras bumped into one another: "I liked the old because the past held deeper sway, spoke to me more, because, just like me, it trusted not things but their long shadow, their passage, not what was living but had once lived and never died." Ah, the Eternal City.
Two themes charmed this reviewer. For a boy of just 15 or 16, Aciman was a ferocious reader. Every week he was given money to buy a new book, and it is astonishing what he read over the course of a year. Stendhal. Virginia Woolf. James Joyce. In fact, Aciman credits Rome with making him a lifelong lover of literature: He was so unhappy there at first that he spent hours holed up in his room, tearing through novels.
Aciman starts to really explore Rome when he is allowed to borrow his friend's bicycle. He discovers that he isn't as far from the center of the city as he had thought. A journey that takes 30 minutes by bus takes only 10 minutes by bicycle. He loves getting lost on side roads, knowing that he would eventually find his way back to a familiar avenue. His joy of discovery is palpable and will resonate with even the casual Citi Bike rider.
Aciman's parents had a complicated relationship. When his father could not find work in Rome, he moved to Paris, in part to keep some distance from his mother. Aciman visits his father and, unlike with Rome, he falls in love with the city immediately. He is bewitched by the Champs-Elysees, and the city stirs something in him. Sex, like the city itself, becomes a new territory for exploration.
There is also, in Paris, a Rosebud moment. One evening Aciman wanders through a bookstore with his father, who buys him the first volume of Remembrance of Things Past. In Roman Year, the influence of Proust can be found on almost every page.
For Aciman, it is not the taste of a madeleine but the smell of fresh almonds that bringshimbacktothe evenings he would share with his family, passing around the nutcracker. "Much as I hated life on Via Clelia," he writes, "being taken back there through the senses summons great joy, something I still don't understand but have grown to accept as one of the most pleasurable inlets to memory."
What do these moments mean, and why do they bring us joy now, even when we hated them then? Aciman, appropriately, quotes a line from Virgil familiar to any Latin student, or Springsteen fan: Perhaps it will please us some day to remember these things.
This is the credo of his book, and of any memoir really. Looking back at our past, even those moments that brought us pain or heartache, can be therapeutic and even pleasurable. For Aciman, it is the act of writing that summons this joy. Reviewing the past serves as a sort of Examen for the soul.
Aciman only lived in Rome for a year; new adventures awaited in (where else?) the Bronx. With help from relatives, he applied to several schools in the United States, and when he was accepted at the Bronx campus of Hunter College, his whole family moved across the ocean. His father didn't want to leave Europe, but he did.
Decades later, Aciman returned to the Via Clelia with his young family in search of the spark of memory. He hoped to find the local grocery store, but it was gone. For a brief moment, he could picture his mother at the stove, his brother returning from basketball practice, but then he lost it. He tried again, years on, when he visited his old apartment. Nothing.
It was only later that night, writing in his diary, that "everything and everyone came back to me."
Maurice Timothy Reidy is deputy editor in chief of America.
Caption: Farrar, Straus & Giroux / 354p $30
Please Note: Illustration(s) are not available due to copyright restrictions.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2025 All rights reserved.
http://americamagazine.org/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
Timothy, Maurice. "THE ETERNAL CITY." America, vol. 232, no. 3, Mar. 2025, pp. 57+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A828300692/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=1de096f1. Accessed 16 Oct. 2025.
Aciman, Andre. Room on the Sea: Three Novellas. Farrar. Jun. 2025.272p. ISBN 9780374613419. $27. r
Bestselling Aciman (Call Me by Your Name) returns with a collection of three novellas that explore longing. In "A Gentleman from Peru," a dapper gentleman sits alone at a resort in southern Italy, observing a group of young Americans. When the Americans become aware of his interest, they invite him to join them. He surprises them by first diagnosing and then healing the shoulder injury of one of the young people, then revealing secrets about each of them. He also believes that he has met one of them in a past life. Is he a faith healer, a mentalist, or a charlatan? "Mariana" is a tale of obsession about a woman whose life falls apart when her love affair with a colleague ends abruptly. Although she knows he is a liar and a cheat, she is willing to demean herself for any small part of his attention. In the collection's tide story, while serving jury duty, two prospective jurors meet and form an immediate connection. VERDICT Count on Aciman for stories filled with love, lust, loss, and not a small measure of regret. These beguiling novellas offer up all of that in spades.--Barbara Love
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2025 A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
Love, Barbara. "Aciman, Andre. Room on the Sea: Three Novellas." Library Journal, vol. 150, no. 4, Apr. 2025, p. 89. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A835170984/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=31566c06. Accessed 16 Oct. 2025.
Andre Aciman. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $27 (272p)
ISBN 978-0-374-61341-9
THIS EXQUISITE TRIPTYCH from Aciman (Call Me By Your Name) explores desire and fate among old friends, new acquaintances, and heartbroken lovers. In "The Gentleman from Peru," a group of young Americans visit Italy's Amalfi Coast, where they become transfixed by a solitary 60-something guest at their hotel. Over drinks, the older man, whose name is Raul, entertains the Americans with his psychic abilities, correctly guessing their birth months and revealing a secret unrequited love between two of them. The elegiac title entry chronicles a week in the lives of two elderly New Yorkers who meet during jury duty. Catherine, a psychologist, and Paul, an attorney, are both unhappily married, a fact they confess to one another as the story builds to a surprising leap of faith. "Mariana" concludes the collection with the somber interior monologue of a scorned woman who struggles to reassess her self-worth and salvage her life without the security of her ex-lover's attention. Throughout, Aciman eloquently explores the life-changing impact of love, explicated in a dazzling soliloquy from Raul on the ever-present prospect of a connection with a stranger ("That person could just as easily be us in another body. And the beauty of it is that they feel it just as much as we do.... Us in others, isn't this the definition of love?"). It's a triumph. Agent: Lynn Nesbit, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc. (June)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2025 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
"Room on the Sea: Three Novellas." Publishers Weekly, vol. 272, no. 15, 14 Apr. 2025, p. 32. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A836572450/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=a2702efa. Accessed 16 Oct. 2025.
ANDRE ACIMAN is a romantic--if a reluctant one--who writes about the joy of finding love and the fleeting nature of amorous entanglements. "I'm a very cruel person, don't be fooled, but by and large I am romantic," Aciman says over Zoom from his Manhattan dining room, where he occasionally works. "There is something magical that can happen between two individuals. It seldom lasts, but it happens." In fact, Aciman writes so well about love that readers often turn to his work for insights about matters of the heart. "I have young readers who are basically looking at my books as an itinerary for what love can be," he says. "Some readers fall in love with my prose, and some fall in love with themselves through my books." It's easy to find things to connect with in Aciman's work--his meditative, elegant books encourage self-reflection as they examine desire, yearning, and heartache; belonging and alienation; and memory and the passage of time. He has published five works of fiction--including Call Me by Your 'Name (2007), his debut novel, which became an Oscar-winning film starring Timothee Chalamet, and Enigma Variations (2017), now in development as a Netflix series; multiple essay collections; and two memoirs: Out of Egypt (1994), about his exile from his birthplace, and Roman Year (2024), about his time living in Italy in the 1960s. His books have sold more than one million copies in the U.S., according to his publisher, FSG, and have been translated into more than 30 languages.
Aciman's latest, Room on the Sea--out in June from FSG--is a collection of three novellas that explore love and loss. "The Gentleman from Peru," infused with magical realism, centers on Raul, a mysterious (perhaps otherworldly) older man staying at a hotel on the Amalfi Coast, who meets a young woman named Margot, whom he may have known in another life. This sets up a mystical star-crossed-lovers scenario between the two characters as they explore the coast and discuss their pasts. "Room on the Sea" follows Paul, a lawyer, and Catherine, a therapist--both married and in their 60s--who meet in a New York City courthouse for jury duty and spend the next five days flirting and trying to decide if they should act on their feelings. The final novella, "Mariana," was inspired by The Portuguese Letters, a 17th-century volume of correspondence purportedly written by a Portuguese nun to a French officer. The story concerns a Midwestern woman in her 20s, working on a manuscript at an academy in Italy, who enters into a sexual relationship with an artist. But when he suddenly dumps her, she spirals into obsession as she looks for opportunities to see him again.
Aciman was born in Egypt in 1951. Growing up in Alexandria, the author spoke French at home and attended English schools. His mother--who contracted meningitis in infancy--was deaf and nonspeaking and relied on him to communicate. "I was her mouthpiece," recalls Aciman, who made phone calls for her and helped with job interviews. "It was stressful." Aciman's father, who introduced him to Marcel Proust, was unfaithful and often absent. "He told me that he realized a week after getting married that it was a big mistake," Aciman says. "It was wonderful to hear that he could be honest; at the same time, I resented his honesty."
In 1965, Aciman and his family were expelled from Egypt in the face of antisemitism and political unrest, events that would shape his writing on identity and loneliness. After leaving Alexandria for Rome, the family struggled financially--a source of shame for Aciman, who spent a lot of his time shuttered in his room reading paperbacks. In 1968 he moved to New York City, and in 1973 he earned a BA in English and comparative literature from Lehman College, followed by an AM and a PhD in comparative literature from Harvard University. He's currently a distinguished professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, where he's been since 2001, and where he founded and directs the Writers' Institute at the Graduate Center. Aciman met his wife--they have three sons--at a party in 1986. "She's beautiful," he says with a smile. She also encouraged him to write Out of Egypt--the book that launched his career.
Lynn Nesbit, Aciman's agent, read Out of Egypt upon its publication and knew she wanted to work with the author. "I remember exactly where I was when I read it, sitting in a small cottage in the country," Nesbit recalls. "I was completely enraptured. The book made me laugh, it was sad, and it was entirely original."
Aciman describes himself as a sad person--"I tend to be more negative than positive"--who feels rootless. His charming accent is an airy mix of French and Italian, yet somehow seems to be from neither place and all his own. "I was already an outsider in Egypt," he says. "No place feels like home, and no place felt like home to begin with." He says he isn't tethered to the present moment; the past and future are more enticing. "I never read the newspaper," he admits. "I'm never interested in the here-and-now I'm interested in that which is timeless."
The novellas that comprise Room on the Sea were originally commissioned by Audible and first appeared in audio format, but Aciman says he always intended for them to appear in print. "I don't write for Audible," he says. "That's not the fate of my work." When asked what motivates him as a storyteller, he says: "Inhibition and desire. I've always been torn by that, and that's what I write about." Aciman is fond of psychological fiction and classic literature: Wuthering Heights is a favorite ("I've read it millions of times," he says), and anything by Marcel Proust. Jonathan Galassi, Aciman's editor, points to the influence of Proust on the author. "Proust is Andre's big hero," Galassi says. "The sense of missed connection, of imperfect love, these are very Aciman traits. Andre's fiction feels like it's out of another era. There's nobody writing in America who's like this. That's part of his magic."
In Room on the Sea, Aciman explores evergreen themes around love: characters let time slip away or take advantage of second chances, seize on love or fail to act on it, crumble under the torment of jealousy and heartache or sit with regret. "Who does not fantasize 90% of the time?" Aciman says. "Basically, we're not in the real world. We fantasize about what we should have said, what we could do."
When not writing, Aciman can sometimes be found riding his bicycle around Central Park, listening to a novel in French, Italian, or English. "I don't know if I'm riding the bicycle to listen to a novel," he says, "or whether I'm listening to a novel and might as well ride a bicycle." He's always reflecting on human motivations and the possibilities of love--and how he can use his insights to connect with readers. "I look for romance everywhere," he says.
By ELAINE SZEWCZYK
"WHEN I ASKED ACIMAN WHAT HE'S BEEN READING LATELY, HE MENTIONED THE NOVELLA THE PROFESSOR AND THE SIREN BY GIUSEPPE TOMASI DI LAMPEDUSA, AND TOLD ME HE WAS 'THUNDERSTRUCK BY ITS GENIUS.' "
Elaine Szewczyk's writing has appeared in McSweeney's and other publications. She's the author of the novel I'm with Stupid.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2025 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
Szewczyk, Elaine. "That's Amore: In three collected novellas, Andre Aciman explores some favorite subjects: love, loss, and the heart's secret desires." Publishers Weekly, vol. 272, no. 16, 21 Apr. 2025, pp. 18+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A837360010/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=a03ee9b2. Accessed 16 Oct. 2025.
Aciman, André ROOM ON THE SEA Farrar, Straus and Giroux (Fiction None) $27.00 6, 24 ISBN: 9780374613419
In search of lost selves.
In three somber novellas, Aciman reprises themes of longing and memory that have informed his previous memoirs and fiction. "The Gentleman From Peru" is Raúl, who befriends eight young Americans at a resort in southern Italy. A healer and prognosticator, he reveals intimate, unsettling details about their lives, and uncanny revelations about himself. All people, he claims, contain multitudes: a shadow-self, a bygone self, a self living elsewhere, a self that beckons to the future. Raúl singles out Margot, the most skeptical of the group, meeting her for lunches, swims, and walks, and taking her to the house where his family spent summers. As Raúl unfurls the mystery of his connection to Margot, though, what might have been a haunting tale is flawed by a convoluted web of coincidence. Similarly, in "Room on the Sea," a tender encounter between Paul, a retired lawyer, and Catherine, a soon-to-be-retired psychologist, is undermined by stilted interchanges. They meet in New York awaiting jury duty assignments, and over the course of lunches, coffees, walks on the High Line, and visits to art galleries, they confess frustration with their lives. Both in stale marriages, they seem to be, as Paul puts it, "waiting for something unforeseen to come along." Catherine agrees: "What I find difficult these days," she admits, "is being who I am, who I want to be, who I could become." It's a difficulty shared by the febrile young narrator of "Mariana," enraged over having been abandoned after an intense, brief affair. She knew her lover was a womanizer, but he awakened in her a newly discovered passion that she does not want to let go. "It's me I miss," she writes to him, "the me I didn't know existed": a rapturous, ecstatic self.
Uneven meditations on aging, regret, and loss.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2025 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
"Aciman, Andre: ROOM ON THE SEA." Kirkus Reviews, 1 May 2025. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A837325486/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=7fbbf9cb. Accessed 16 Oct. 2025.