I suspect that Alibis is the sort of book whose pleasure it would be good to prolong, the kind of book where it would be satisfying to read an essay a day and reflect on each one, because there is without doubt lots to reflect on here. That isn’t what I did—I started reading slowly, then read a great big chunk of the book on a plane ride—but I still enjoyed it immensely.
The flap copy of Alibis describes it as “a series of linked essays about time, place, identity and art,” which probably sums it up more succinctly than I could. Aciman writes beautifully about places, about cities. He writes about Venice, about Paris, about Tuscany, about Barcelona. He writes about Rome, where he lived for three years as a teenager – he and his parents were refugees from Alexandria, waiting for their visas to America. He writes about New York, where he lives now. But he’s not only writing about place as place, about what makes Rome different from Venice and different from Paris—though he captures that, too, the different sights and sounds and qualities of light of a given city. He’s writing about these places and his experiences of them and his memories of them as a way to explore the experience of living in the world, and, more specifically, the experience of living in the world while also feeling a certain disconnect from it. Aciman is, in many ways, a reader’s writer and a writer’s writer: he writes a lot about the experiences of reading and writing and what reading and writing are/do: whether, for example, writing is a way to more fully experience the world or a way to avoid experiencing it. In an essay called “Temporizing” Aciman writes about Proust and how “memory and wishful thinking are filters through which he registers, processes, and understands present experience […] experience is meaningless,—it is not even experience—unless it comes as the memory of experience, or, which amounts to the same, as the memory of unrealized experience” (68).
I like Aciman’s thoughts on his own temporizing tendencies, and I like, too, his concern with memory and the multiplicity of selves and the multiplicity of possible selves—who we could have been if things had just been a little different. (It’s an interesting tension, though: I think he also has a sense of the inescapability of the self, a sense that actually though circumstance may be temporary and provisional, identity isn’t.) And I love what Aciman writes about complexity and ambivalence, in passages like this:
I may write about place and displacement, but what I’m really writing about is dispersion, evasion, ambivalence: not so much a subject as a move in everything I write. I may write about little parks in New York that remind me of Rome and about tiny squares in Paris that remind me of New York, and about so many spots in the world that will ultimately take me back to Alexandria. But this crisscrossed trajectory is simply my way of showing how scattered and divided I am about everything else in life. (88)
Or this:
I write to give my life a form, a narrative, a chronology; and, for good measure, I seal loose ends with cadenced prose and add glitter where I know things were quite lusterless. I write to reach out to the real world, though I know that I write to stay away from a world that is still too real and never as provisional or ambivalent as I’d like it to be. In the end it’s no longer, and perhaps never was, the world that I like, but writing about it. I write to find out who I am; I write to give myself the slip. I write because I am always at one remove from the world but have grown to like saying so. (89)
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