Although he has written several works of fiction and non-fiction, most of us know André Aciman thanks to the film based on his novel Call Me By My Name. The theme of teenage sexual awakening, involving heterosexual and homosexual desire, recurs in this memoir of his year in Rome. In 1966 André, aged 16 or so, with his brother and their mute mother, emigrate from an increasingly anti-Semitic Egypt to Italy, where they have relatives – their rich, “impulsive” (that is, bad tempered) Uncle Claude, their kind Aunt Flora, and others.
The memoir is an almost day-by-day account of the year in Rome. Uncle Claude, mean but loyal, accommodates the family in a run-down apartment in a shabby area, very different from the bourgeois home they had in Alexandria. Although André knows Italian, everything is strange and repulsive. He hates Rome initially and plans to get out of it as soon as he can – Paris and New York are in his sights. Gradually, however, he falls in love with the city, first with the historical centre, but also with the less picturesque parts – and with various Romans.
André Aciman has edited The Proust Project, and the pace of this memoir, as well as its close attention to social and emotional relationships, may nod to the great French novel. The pages are lively with aunts and uncles, neighbours, schoolteachers, friends, lovers, conversations, arguments – and books, because André is a voracious reader. His account of the minutiae of everyday life is deepened by frequent reflections on the city, the Romans, sex, humanity in general and especially the situation of the eternal exile. The perspective of the observant, intelligent, critical teenager is enhanced by the philosophical musing of the older experienced writer – both the same person, the same consciousness, and yet not.
In these pages you live with André and his family in that gritty Roman apartment. You move around the city with him, gasp at the sudden dramatic appearance of the Colosseum from the bus window, savour the smell of bergamot: “Like music, it opened a universe of wonderful things, but I couldn’t name a single one.”
The book is a cornucopia of wonderful impressions and emotions, some so elusive as to challenge, if not defy, verbalisation. It’s a superb portrait of a complex city through the eyes of a complex teenager, on an exciting journey through this unpredictable life.
Éilís Ní Dhuibhne’s latest book is Well, You Don’t Look it: Irish Women Writers Reflect on Ageing (Salmon Press, 2024, edited with Michaela Schage-Frueh)
