(by André Aciman)
I read Alibis a few years ago and really liked it; though that was a series of linked essays and this is more of a straight-up memoir, the vibes are similar: Proustian, readerly, writerly. I love Aciman’s prose: there are sentences in this book that I felt I had to stop and re-read because they’re so damn good.
As the title suggests, this book is about Aciman’s time in Rome, where his family lived when he was a teenager: my notes from when I read Alibis say he lived there for three years, not one, so I guess this new book condenses the timeline, but eh, artistic license. Aciman writes about arriving in Naples from Alexandria in the mid-1960s with his younger brother and their mom (who is deaf), where they meet up with Aciman’s great-uncle, who drives them to the apartment in Rome that he’s renting to them. In Alexandria, Aciman had grown up in wealth, but his father’s assets have been seized by the government, and the apartment in Rome is in a neighborhood that Aciman describes as “thoroughly working-class” with “drab, ill-lit stores everywhere” and buildings covered in soot. Aciman’s brother adjusts more quickly than Aciman himself does; he writes about his time spent alone in his room, reading, escaping into books, and about his solitary explorations of the city in contrast with his brother’s time spent playing sports with new friends. There are complicated family dynamics (Aciman’s father stays in Egypt for a time, ostensibly to tie up loose ends but also because he has a mistress in Alexandria, and later ends up living in Paris while his wife and sons are living in Rome; the family is dependent on Aciman’s volatile great-uncle for financial and logistical help) and practical problems (the question of where Aciman and his brother will go to school is a big one, as is the larger question of where the family will ultimately end up living) but there’s also a world to explore—or worlds, really: the world of literature, the world of adulthood, the world of Rome.
There are so many parts of this book I loved, like when Aciman talks about the possibility of him and his brother going to an English school in Rome and how this makes him think about the “fantasy England” he imagines based on the books he’s read, “with its stiff afternoon tea rituals, its perpetual wet pavements, and its autumnal evenings that lasted far too long before resolving into dinner.” He goes on to say this, which is just so good: “My encounter with Joyce’s “Araby” wouldn’t let go of me, even if it was set in Dublin, not London, and my readings of Virginia Woolf, who reminded me of Aunt Flora, took me back to those afternoons when, together in my grandmother’s home in Alexandria, Flora and I would read Mrs. Dalloway, thinking we were slipping out of Egypt back into an old England that we missed and ultimately belonged to, knowing all along that it had never really existed or been our home.”
Place is a big part of this book, unsurprisingly: place and displacement and memory and imagination. At another point, Aciman talks about reading Lawrence Durrell and thinking of Alexandria, thinking about “not the city as I remembered it, but traces of a city that might never have existed but was reinvented and in a strange way more real on paper for me that night than was my memory of it.” There is also a great passage about borrowing a bike and exploring Rome, with so many excellent sense-memories—the feeling of riding a bike on cobblestones, the taste of zeppole purchased from a street vendor, the scent of bergamot feeling like a scent “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 redefine its smell and was trapping its memory for who knew how many years.”
Leave a Reply