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Alibis: Essays on Elsewhere
Celebrated as one of the most poignant stylists of his generation, André Aciman has written a luminous series of linked essays about time, place, identity, and art that show him at his very finest. From beautiful and moving pieces about the memory evoked by the scent of lavender; to meditations on cities like Barcelona, Rome, Paris, and New York; to his sheer ability to unearth life secrets from an ordinary street corner, Alibis reminds the reader that Aciman is a master of the personal essay.
208 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2011
115 people are currently reading
2651 people want to read
About the author
André Aciman
54 books10.3k followersAndré Aciman was born in Alexandria, Egypt and is an American memoirist, essayist, novelist, and scholar of seventeenth-century literature. He has also written many essays and reviews on Marcel Proust. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, The Paris Review, The New Republic, Condé Nast Traveler as well as in many volumes of The Best American Essays. Aciman received his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Harvard University, has taught at Princeton and Bard and is Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature at The CUNY Graduate Center. He is currently chair of the Ph. D. Program in Comparative Literature and founder and director of The Writers' Institute at the Graduate Center.
Aciman is the author of the Whiting Award-winning memoir Out of Egypt (1995), an account of his childhood as a Jew growing up in post-colonial Egypt. Aciman has published two other books: False Papers: Essays in Exile and Memory (2001), and a novel Call Me By Your Name (2007), which was chosen as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and won the Lambda Literary Award for Men's Fiction (2008). His forthcoming novel Eight White Nights (FSG) will be published on February 14, 2010
Aciman is the author of the Whiting Award-winning memoir Out of Egypt (1995), an account of his childhood as a Jew growing up in post-colonial Egypt. Aciman has published two other books: False Papers: Essays in Exile and Memory (2001), and a novel Call Me By Your Name (2007), which was chosen as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and won the Lambda Literary Award for Men's Fiction (2008). His forthcoming novel Eight White Nights (FSG) will be published on February 14, 2010
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 138 reviews
February 27, 2012
Oh, I can't. I'm so sorry, Mr. Aciman, but I just cannot sit with you right now. Your world is not mine, and you make absolutely no effort to welcome me to it. You must understand that I want nothing more than do let you guide me, but you don't want to do that. You want to tell me about how pleased you are that you are in this world, and you are not interested in relating to anyone who is not already inside it. Aside from the first essay about lavender (in which I found something true enough to make me want to keep reading), this was a book of status symbols disguised as travel essays. Even his essay on Monet and his love for a particular painting, which, I love essays about peoples' obsession with art- even that was really about how he had a better travel experience than you. He could speak the language, and met Real People who led him, coincidentally, to what he wanted. Complete with musings about how all travel should be random and spontaneous to truly fulfill us. He wrote about the Place des Vosges in Paris and name dropped some of my favorite French historical figures, but the real point of the essay was the fact that he was in Paris, and knew things that you didn't. He would move to Paris, you know, but there is just no TIME for that in his busy life of writing essays at ritzy resorts and traveling. Yes, that's why most of us don't move to Paris, Mr. Aciman. I sympathize.
Am I just envious? I don't know. I sound like I am a bit, don't I? I was thinking maybe I just resent reading about a man who's biggest problem is that he thinks he may have given erroneous directions to his gondolier in Venice, but doesn't want to sacrifice his cool pose enough to fix it. There's probably some element of that. But I think its really more about the purpose of these essays as contrasted to their presentation. This is a book about the reflections of a middle-aged man on the delicate nostalgia of his youth and the nuances and fleeting moments of meaning he seems to grab between plane flights and dinners on the Riveria. This is NOT a Fantasia of passions and European landscapes. It's about him. Which I thought would be fine after the first essay. I was even okay with that one about his childhood in Rome, as a kid who loved books and was too shy to talk to girls. But the rest of it where he tries to pretend that it is about travel, that's a problem because I think he gets what is important about travel wrong. I think he misses the good stuff. I do not care whether you went swimming at noon while tourists were out seeing things in Venice, thus making you like the native people who don't have to sightsee. Why on earth would you choose staying at your hotel and swimming to tell me about when you are in Venice, unless it was about how cool you are that you don't have to go see Venice? Lot of performance that I have no patience with. The priorities were off here, and I did not like it.
I don't know. I might revisit it later and try again.
Am I just envious? I don't know. I sound like I am a bit, don't I? I was thinking maybe I just resent reading about a man who's biggest problem is that he thinks he may have given erroneous directions to his gondolier in Venice, but doesn't want to sacrifice his cool pose enough to fix it. There's probably some element of that. But I think its really more about the purpose of these essays as contrasted to their presentation. This is a book about the reflections of a middle-aged man on the delicate nostalgia of his youth and the nuances and fleeting moments of meaning he seems to grab between plane flights and dinners on the Riveria. This is NOT a Fantasia of passions and European landscapes. It's about him. Which I thought would be fine after the first essay. I was even okay with that one about his childhood in Rome, as a kid who loved books and was too shy to talk to girls. But the rest of it where he tries to pretend that it is about travel, that's a problem because I think he gets what is important about travel wrong. I think he misses the good stuff. I do not care whether you went swimming at noon while tourists were out seeing things in Venice, thus making you like the native people who don't have to sightsee. Why on earth would you choose staying at your hotel and swimming to tell me about when you are in Venice, unless it was about how cool you are that you don't have to go see Venice? Lot of performance that I have no patience with. The priorities were off here, and I did not like it.
I don't know. I might revisit it later and try again.
collection-read-in-part
July 5, 2018I was going to give this book away. I had read the first essay, "Lavender." This, I thought was Aciman in his reputed Proust-like mode. Nice, but who has time? (I haven't read Proust.)
Today I picked the book up again and got a whiff of lavender. I don't have synesthesia, or didn't used to. I read one more essay. It moved me.
Books--for when one is lonely or out of sorts or sync.
Today I picked the book up again and got a whiff of lavender. I don't have synesthesia, or didn't used to. I read one more essay. It moved me.
Books--for when one is lonely or out of sorts or sync.
December 2, 2020
This collection of essays tiptoes along the line between memoir and diary, and you get the sense that you should read them very quietly, so as to respect the privacy of the writer who is trying to find himself on the page before you. The pieces reflect on the meaning of place to one who is always already displaced, on the meaning of identity for one who feels himself a shadow. Perhaps the following quote best speaks to the fundamental absence at the heart of these essays, a void that Aciman doesn't quite want to cover over with his words:
"Exile disappears the very notion of a home, of a name, of a tongue. The exile no longer knows what he's exiled from."
I, for one, will be hungry to read anything Aciman writes as he continues to search.
"Exile disappears the very notion of a home, of a name, of a tongue. The exile no longer knows what he's exiled from."
I, for one, will be hungry to read anything Aciman writes as he continues to search.
February 21, 2012
from Intimacy:
I was after something intimate and I learned to spot it in the first alley, in the first verse of a poem, on the first glance of a stranger. Great books, like great cities, always let us find things we think are only in us and couldn’t possibly belong elsewhere but that turn out to be broadcast everywhere we look. Great artists are those who give us what we think was already ours.
In the words of Emanuele Tesauro: “We enjoy seeing our own thoughts blossom in someone’s mind, while that someone is equally pleased to spy what our own mind furtively conceals.” I was a cipher. But, like me, everyone else was a cipher as well. Ultimately, I wanted to peer into books, places, and people because wherever I looked I was always looking for myself, or for traces of myself, or better yet, for a world out there filled with people and characters who could be made to be like me, because being like me and being me and liking the things I liked was nothing more than their roundabout way of being as close to, as open to, and as bound to me as I wished to be to them.
from My Monet Moment:
It would be just like me to travel all the way to Bordighera from the United States and never one look up the current name of the villa. Any art book could have told me that its name was Villa Garnier. Anyone a the station could have pointed immediately to it had I asked for it by name. I would have spared myself hours of meandering about town. But then, unlike Ulysses, I would have arrived straight to Ithaca and never once encountered Circe or Calypso, never met Nausica or heard the enchanting strains of the Sirens’ song, never gotten sufficiently lost to experience the sudden, disconcerting moment of arriving in, of all places, the right place.
She opens a door and we stop onto the roof terrace. Once again, I am struck by one of the most magnificent vistas I have ever seen. “Money used to come to paint here as a guest of Signor Moreno.” I instantly recognize the scene from art books and begin to snap pictures. Then the nun corrects herself. “Actually, he used to paint from up there,” she says, pointing to another floor I hadn’t noticed that is perched right above the roof. “Questo e l’oblo di Monet.” “This is Monet’s porthole.”
from Temporizing:
Proust’s novel is about a man who looks back to a time when all he did was look forward to better times. To rephrase this somewhat: he looks back to a time when what he looked forward to was perhaps nothing more than sitting down and writing… and therefore looking back.
It is not even Egypt or the things he remembers that he loves; what he loves is just remembering, because remembering ensures that the present won’t ever prevail. Remembering is merely a posture that turns its head away and, in the process, even when there is nothing to remember, is shrewd enough to make up memories – surrogate, standby memories – if only to justify not having to look straight at the present.
from New York, Luminous:
In that spellbound moment when we’re suddenly willing to call this the only home we’ll ever want on earth, New York lets us into a bigger secret yet: that it “gets” us, that we needn’t worry about those dark and twisted, spectral thoughts we are far too reluctant to tell others about – it shares the exact same ones itself, always has.
from Afterword: Parallax:
The German writer W.G. Sebald, who died in 2001, frequently wrote about people whose lives are shattered and who are trapped in a state of numbness, stagnation, and stunned sterility. Given a few displacements, which occurred either by mistake or through some whim of history, they end up living the wrong life. The past interferes and contaminates the present, while the present looks back and distorts the past.
Sebald’s characters see displacements everywhere, not just all around them but within themselves as well. Sebald himself cannot think, cannot see, cannot remember, and, I would wager, cannot write without positing displacement as a foundational metaphor.
In order to write you either retrieve displacement or you invent it.
----------------
things that were my favourites:
Lavender; a wonderful easing into the essays, into reflections on memory, on past, on how we look back on the past and frame it, on how it impacts us into adulthood. it reminded me of bosnia, of my grandfather (even though it was about aciman’s father).
New York, Luminous; a walk through a city through movies and literary references. movies i hadn’t seen were brought to live, then the essay was re-read and i saw how perfectly they shine and how fitting they are.
The Buildings Themselves Have Died; for being a perfectly named story. for making new york come alive in a different way than New York, Luminous. for reminding me of david foster wallace. though there are differences – dfw sees it through the older generations, aciman through the buildings themselves.
I was after something intimate and I learned to spot it in the first alley, in the first verse of a poem, on the first glance of a stranger. Great books, like great cities, always let us find things we think are only in us and couldn’t possibly belong elsewhere but that turn out to be broadcast everywhere we look. Great artists are those who give us what we think was already ours.
In the words of Emanuele Tesauro: “We enjoy seeing our own thoughts blossom in someone’s mind, while that someone is equally pleased to spy what our own mind furtively conceals.” I was a cipher. But, like me, everyone else was a cipher as well. Ultimately, I wanted to peer into books, places, and people because wherever I looked I was always looking for myself, or for traces of myself, or better yet, for a world out there filled with people and characters who could be made to be like me, because being like me and being me and liking the things I liked was nothing more than their roundabout way of being as close to, as open to, and as bound to me as I wished to be to them.
from My Monet Moment:
It would be just like me to travel all the way to Bordighera from the United States and never one look up the current name of the villa. Any art book could have told me that its name was Villa Garnier. Anyone a the station could have pointed immediately to it had I asked for it by name. I would have spared myself hours of meandering about town. But then, unlike Ulysses, I would have arrived straight to Ithaca and never once encountered Circe or Calypso, never met Nausica or heard the enchanting strains of the Sirens’ song, never gotten sufficiently lost to experience the sudden, disconcerting moment of arriving in, of all places, the right place.
She opens a door and we stop onto the roof terrace. Once again, I am struck by one of the most magnificent vistas I have ever seen. “Money used to come to paint here as a guest of Signor Moreno.” I instantly recognize the scene from art books and begin to snap pictures. Then the nun corrects herself. “Actually, he used to paint from up there,” she says, pointing to another floor I hadn’t noticed that is perched right above the roof. “Questo e l’oblo di Monet.” “This is Monet’s porthole.”
from Temporizing:
Proust’s novel is about a man who looks back to a time when all he did was look forward to better times. To rephrase this somewhat: he looks back to a time when what he looked forward to was perhaps nothing more than sitting down and writing… and therefore looking back.
It is not even Egypt or the things he remembers that he loves; what he loves is just remembering, because remembering ensures that the present won’t ever prevail. Remembering is merely a posture that turns its head away and, in the process, even when there is nothing to remember, is shrewd enough to make up memories – surrogate, standby memories – if only to justify not having to look straight at the present.
from New York, Luminous:
In that spellbound moment when we’re suddenly willing to call this the only home we’ll ever want on earth, New York lets us into a bigger secret yet: that it “gets” us, that we needn’t worry about those dark and twisted, spectral thoughts we are far too reluctant to tell others about – it shares the exact same ones itself, always has.
from Afterword: Parallax:
The German writer W.G. Sebald, who died in 2001, frequently wrote about people whose lives are shattered and who are trapped in a state of numbness, stagnation, and stunned sterility. Given a few displacements, which occurred either by mistake or through some whim of history, they end up living the wrong life. The past interferes and contaminates the present, while the present looks back and distorts the past.
Sebald’s characters see displacements everywhere, not just all around them but within themselves as well. Sebald himself cannot think, cannot see, cannot remember, and, I would wager, cannot write without positing displacement as a foundational metaphor.
In order to write you either retrieve displacement or you invent it.
----------------
things that were my favourites:
Lavender; a wonderful easing into the essays, into reflections on memory, on past, on how we look back on the past and frame it, on how it impacts us into adulthood. it reminded me of bosnia, of my grandfather (even though it was about aciman’s father).
New York, Luminous; a walk through a city through movies and literary references. movies i hadn’t seen were brought to live, then the essay was re-read and i saw how perfectly they shine and how fitting they are.
The Buildings Themselves Have Died; for being a perfectly named story. for making new york come alive in a different way than New York, Luminous. for reminding me of david foster wallace. though there are differences – dfw sees it through the older generations, aciman through the buildings themselves.
September 27, 2020
To open this book is to plunge with Aciman as he dreamily, deeply reflects on his very personal thoughts. It's a dive to all his longings. Overall, it has a pensive tone.
There would be minutes during his recollection that the reader could feel alienated or short of patience, given that not every experience one had in life could be related to by others. Nonetheless, one could still pick up on these essays and share private musings that one may happen to likewise have.
Here are my favorites:
Rating: 3.5/5
There would be minutes during his recollection that the reader could feel alienated or short of patience, given that not every experience one had in life could be related to by others. Nonetheless, one could still pick up on these essays and share private musings that one may happen to likewise have.
Here are my favorites:
"I like not knowing. Knowing anything about the [painting] would most likely undo its spell."
"…he liked [painting] this town more than he loved the town itself, because what he loved was more in him than in the town itself, though he needed the town to draw it out of him."
"I’ve come for something I know doesn’t exist. For artists seldom teach us to see better. They teach us to see other than what’s there to be seen."
"We seldom ever see, or read, or love things as they in themselves really are, nor, for that matter, do we even know our impressions of them as they really are. What matters is knowing what we see when we see other than what lies before us. It is the film we see, the film that breathes essence into otherwise lifeless objects, the film we crave to share with others. What we reach for and what ultimately touches us is the radiance we’ve projected on things, not the things themselves – the envelope, not the letter, the wrapping, not the gift."
Rating: 3.5/5
August 16, 2022
This one comes with a highbrow alert but if you aren’t annoyed by snobbery, it’s really good.
Essays/memoirs/vignettes mainly on travelling and that fleeting feeling of being here nor there. Tuscany, New York, Paris etc all get their moment in this collection. Like I’ve said a hundred times before - no one does nostalgia and bittersweetness like Aciman does. His writing is the Indian summer of literature - June, July and August gone, the memories are still fresh but already fading and you’d do anything to keep the feeling of those languid hot days alive a bit longer. He talks about this weird phenomenon every traveller has felt; how dreaming about a place or remembering a place is a stronger and sweeter feeling than actually being there (again). There is also a great essay on lavender if you’re into perfumes.
There were few in the bunch that I read diagonally and that were too stream of consciousness-y for me (he is a Proust scholar and it shows) but overall it was a beautiful collection.
Essays/memoirs/vignettes mainly on travelling and that fleeting feeling of being here nor there. Tuscany, New York, Paris etc all get their moment in this collection. Like I’ve said a hundred times before - no one does nostalgia and bittersweetness like Aciman does. His writing is the Indian summer of literature - June, July and August gone, the memories are still fresh but already fading and you’d do anything to keep the feeling of those languid hot days alive a bit longer. He talks about this weird phenomenon every traveller has felt; how dreaming about a place or remembering a place is a stronger and sweeter feeling than actually being there (again). There is also a great essay on lavender if you’re into perfumes.
There were few in the bunch that I read diagonally and that were too stream of consciousness-y for me (he is a Proust scholar and it shows) but overall it was a beautiful collection.
December 29, 2012
On Monet:
He is not even sure he’s not making it up. Which is also why he needs to paint it … What he was after hangs between the visible and the invisible, between the here and now and the seemingly elsewhere.
This is Aciman’s project, his compulsion: to make material these wisps of feelings, impressions, the space between places and things.
Alibis is fundamentally a book about longing infinitely displaced—longing for lives not lived, past lovers, abandoned cities—with the recurrent suggestion that all longing is about itself and the self. Aciman lives in an agonizingly evocative world, where any sight or sound can trigger an unending stream of associations and memories. No wonder that the first essay is about scents. It perfectly augurs all of the book’s concerns.
Aciman understands that there is something about being a reader that prevents one from living in the present: that inescapable awareness of other times and places, such that they come to exist congruent and contemporaneous with one’s own, which loses all meaning and force in contrast, the tiny, arbitrary fulcrum against which balance the weights of the past and future. I cannot think of a more appropriate title than “Alibis.” All through the book, Aciman is saying: “I couldn’t have been here, experiencing my own life, for I was really there.” And what of the subtitle: “Essays on Elsewhere”? Elsewhere with respect to where? With respect to everywhere, wherever one is. Fitting that Aciman writes of himself as an exile, one who “is always in one place but elsewhere as well,” consequently in neither place, beyond the idea of place.
Aciman is never where he is. He remembers remembering, he looks back to looking ahead, looks ahead to looking back; nothing is solid, merely shadows of shadows. Everything is done in memory of something else. Nothing is seen, but rather imagined. The idea of a thing is more real than the thing itself. Perpetuity is the essential quality of longing: it cannot be satisfied, fulfilled, by definition. Many of the essays feature Aciman going in search of something—a historical site, or a relic from his past—and failing to find it, finding only himself instead, which is what he sought from the beginning. The essays are shot through with a variously implicit and explicit loneliness and search for love, which, it strikes me, are characterized by the amorphous, discontinuous qualities Aciman also locates in memory, time, etc.
And Aciman always contains his own negation; he acknowledges that his central obsession, the idea of other, better selves, may be the most convincing and deceptive mirage of all. All this deferring and yearning may be for naught. What reader doesn’t entertain this notion with some degree of regularity? But the sheer poignancy of Aciman’s essays diminish this doubt inasmuch as it can be diminished.
He is not even sure he’s not making it up. Which is also why he needs to paint it … What he was after hangs between the visible and the invisible, between the here and now and the seemingly elsewhere.
This is Aciman’s project, his compulsion: to make material these wisps of feelings, impressions, the space between places and things.
Alibis is fundamentally a book about longing infinitely displaced—longing for lives not lived, past lovers, abandoned cities—with the recurrent suggestion that all longing is about itself and the self. Aciman lives in an agonizingly evocative world, where any sight or sound can trigger an unending stream of associations and memories. No wonder that the first essay is about scents. It perfectly augurs all of the book’s concerns.
Aciman understands that there is something about being a reader that prevents one from living in the present: that inescapable awareness of other times and places, such that they come to exist congruent and contemporaneous with one’s own, which loses all meaning and force in contrast, the tiny, arbitrary fulcrum against which balance the weights of the past and future. I cannot think of a more appropriate title than “Alibis.” All through the book, Aciman is saying: “I couldn’t have been here, experiencing my own life, for I was really there.” And what of the subtitle: “Essays on Elsewhere”? Elsewhere with respect to where? With respect to everywhere, wherever one is. Fitting that Aciman writes of himself as an exile, one who “is always in one place but elsewhere as well,” consequently in neither place, beyond the idea of place.
Aciman is never where he is. He remembers remembering, he looks back to looking ahead, looks ahead to looking back; nothing is solid, merely shadows of shadows. Everything is done in memory of something else. Nothing is seen, but rather imagined. The idea of a thing is more real than the thing itself. Perpetuity is the essential quality of longing: it cannot be satisfied, fulfilled, by definition. Many of the essays feature Aciman going in search of something—a historical site, or a relic from his past—and failing to find it, finding only himself instead, which is what he sought from the beginning. The essays are shot through with a variously implicit and explicit loneliness and search for love, which, it strikes me, are characterized by the amorphous, discontinuous qualities Aciman also locates in memory, time, etc.
And Aciman always contains his own negation; he acknowledges that his central obsession, the idea of other, better selves, may be the most convincing and deceptive mirage of all. All this deferring and yearning may be for naught. What reader doesn’t entertain this notion with some degree of regularity? But the sheer poignancy of Aciman’s essays diminish this doubt inasmuch as it can be diminished.
September 7, 2017
Nonfiction—Essay, Travel. Trade Paperback. Found after reading “Call Me By My Name” by same author.
January 31, 2012
In his novel Eight White Nights, Andre Aciman's narrator says, "...longing makes us who we are, makes us better than who we are, because longing fills the heart. ... The way absence and sorrow and mourning fill the heart." In the same way, the highly personal essays in Alibis explore the world of the author's memory: "It is not the things we long for that we love; it is longing itself--just as it is not what we remember but remembrance itself that we love." In the essays of Alibis the author remembers Paris, Rome, and Alexandria. There is a gentle sorrow at the core of Aciman's work, the sorrow, I think, of the exile. Aciman was born in Egypt in a French-speaking home where family members also spoke Italian, Greek, Ladino, and Arabic. His family were Jews of Turkish and Italian origin who settled in Alexandria, Egypt in 1905. Aciman moved with his family to Italy at the age of fifteen and then to New York at nineteen, and he currently teaches literature in New York.
In his essay Temporizing, Aciman addresses his tendency directly: "What gives meaning to a life so clearly inscribed in temporizing is not someone's ability to confront pain, sorrow, or loss, but rather someone's ability to craft ways around pain, sorrow, loss. It is the craft that makes life meaningful, not the life itself." In Lavendar, the author uses fragrance as a springboard into his memories of youth, family, and place. Everywhere in his writing, he seeks the "shadow of the past", the world experienced at a "slight angle". Aciman "writes around" his past, and his essays are a remarkable exercise in the power of restraint. Thoughtful and beautiful writing, but very carefully distant.
In his essay Temporizing, Aciman addresses his tendency directly: "What gives meaning to a life so clearly inscribed in temporizing is not someone's ability to confront pain, sorrow, or loss, but rather someone's ability to craft ways around pain, sorrow, loss. It is the craft that makes life meaningful, not the life itself." In Lavendar, the author uses fragrance as a springboard into his memories of youth, family, and place. Everywhere in his writing, he seeks the "shadow of the past", the world experienced at a "slight angle". Aciman "writes around" his past, and his essays are a remarkable exercise in the power of restraint. Thoughtful and beautiful writing, but very carefully distant.
August 28, 2018
Begin dit jaar las ik met veel plezier "Call me by your name" en "Enigma variations": twee fraaie romans over de pluriformiteit en intensiteit van liefde en verlangen, waarin het verlangen juist des te heviger wordt - en des te meer de beleving van de liefde verrijkt- naarmate het NIET wordt vervuld. Smartelijke romans, omdat het niet vervullen van het verlangen ook onstilbare pijn oplevert, maar ook inspirerende romans omdat juist dat onbevredigde verlangen zo veel extra kleur aan het leven geeft. Meer kleur dan het normale, routineuze leven van alledag heeft, met zijn min of meer gerealiseerde doelen en genoegens.
En nu las ik dan "Alibi's", een bundel persoonlijke essays van dezelfde Andre Aciman, die allemaal gaan over de smart en het genot van nostalgie en verlangen. Of, anders gezegd, van een geest die nooit helemaal in het hier en nu vertoeft omdat hij droomt van een (grotendeels gefantaseerd) verleden of verlangt naar een (grotendeels onmogelijke) toekomst. De geest van een schrijver die niet zozeer de "dingen zelf" wil afbeelden maar de weerslag van die dingen in zijn altijd dolende geest, niet zozeer de "werkelijkheid zelf" of "de realiteit" maar de al dan niet illusoire associatieve patronen die de schrijver meent te ontwaren in de realiteit. Waarbij die patronen en associaties minstens zo veel zeggen over de schrijver zelf als over de realiteit. Zonder overigens ooit een duidelijk beeld van die schrijver op te leveren, want ook die is een raadsel, een veranderlijke en ondoorgrondelijke verzameling van door nostalgie en verlangen vertekende perspectieven en beelden.
"Alibi's" is een verzameling van persoonlijke, essayistische stukken, die over de meest uiteenlopende onderwerpen gaan: een prachtig stuk over de vele vluchtige en vervlogen werelden die worden opgeroepen door de geur van lavendel; een eveneens prachtig stuk over Proust; mijmeringen over de pluriformiteit van Acimans eigen identiteit en verleden; mijmeringen over aard en waarde van zijn schrijverschap; mijmeringen naar aanleiding van allerlei voor hem belangrijke streken en steden, zoals New York, Venetië, Toscane, Barcelona, Rome, Parijs, Alexandrië. De stukken over steden zijn wel wat wisselend van kwaliteit: sommige zijn wat kort en oppervlakkig, en er sluipen hier en daar ook wat m.i. onnodige herhalingen in. Toch heb ik ook die stukken meestal met plezier gelezen, omdat ze niet op de geijkt-toeristische wijze gingen over de stad of het landschap zelf, maar over de vorm die zij aannemen in Acimans van nostalgie en verlangen doordesemde brein. Of, beter gezegd, de vorm die zij krijgen door Acimans onderzoekende en kunstzinnige schrijversblik. Zo zegt hij: "And perhaps it is the film I go in search of each time I'm back in Rome - not Rome. We seldom see, or read, or love things as they themselves really are, nor, for that matter, do we even know our impressions of them as they really are. What matters is knowing what we see when we see other than what lies before us. It is the film we see, the film that breathes essence into otherwise lifeless objects, the film we crave to share with others. What we reach for and what ultimately touches us is the radiance we've projected on things, not the things themselves - the envelope, not the letter, the wrapping, not the gift". Ook zegt hij: "Lucretius says that all objects release films, or "peeled skins" of themselves. These intimations travel from the objects and beings around us and eventually reach our senses. But the opposite is also true: we radiate films of what we have within us and project them onto everything we see - which is how we become aware of the world and, ultimately, why we come to love it. Without these films, these fictions, which are both our alibis and the archive of our innermost life, we have no way to connect or touch anything".
Wij zien de dingen altijd door het betekenisraster van ons persoonlijke referentiekader: alles wat wij zien is minstens ten dele ook de projectie van ons eigen perspectief, ons eigen ik, ons eigen innerlijk leven, onze nostalgie en ons verlangen. Dat zegt Aciman feitelijk in deze citaten, en daarmee zegt hij niks nieuws. Maar hij zegt en beargumenteert het wel veel eleganter dan ik het ooit zou kunnen, zoals hopelijk uit de citaten blijkt. Bovendien volstaat hij niet met de droge constatering dat "Rome" voor hem alleen het "Rome" is dat bestaat in de film in zijn hoofd. Nee, hij onderzoekt alle facetten van die film, alle elementen van nostalgie en verlangen die Rome in deze film heeft, en zet zijn volle verbeeldingskracht in om associatieve patronen en betekenislagen te ontdekken die deze film nog rijker maken. Ook voor ons is Rome niks meer dan een beeld in de film die wij afdraaien in ons hoofd, maar die film is volgens mij in de regel flink wat saaier dan die van Aciman. Ook voor ons zijn de dingen zelf alleen in onze waarneming gegeven, maar die waarneming is minder met verbeeldingskracht gevoed dan die van Aciman. Wat Aciman dus zegt is niet: ga naar Rome en geniet. Wat hij zegt is: ontplooi ten volle je verbeeldingskracht, doorleef daarbij zonder terughoudendheid alle in jezelf verborgen facetten van verlangen en nostalgie, verrijk op die manier je blik, en kijk met DEZE blik naar Rome of willekeurig welke andere stad. En verwonder je vervolgens over de film, ook lang nadat je hem gezien hebt.
De essaybundel van Aciman lees ik kortom als een mooie en bij vlagen inspirerende exploratie van onze door nostalgie en verlangen getekende geest. Net als zijn romans, zij het op andere wijze en met andere middelen. De essays en romans vertellen geen halleluja-verhaal voor positivo's, want nostalgie en verlangen zijn ook pijnlijk omdat ze gepaard gaan met het besef dat je de dingen zelf nooit helemaal bezit of doorgrondt. Bovendien leiden ze tot het pijnlijke besef dat je ook je eigen stad en land niet kent, evenmin als je eigen ik: dat je zelf nooit meer bent dan een raadselachtige nomade in een onbekend land, temeer omdat je altijd verlangt of terugverlangt naar je eigen thuis maar daar nooit definitief woont. Je bent nooit echt thuis, leeft nooit echt in het moment. En dat pijnlijke besef krijgt bij Aciman alle aandacht. Maar nog meer aandacht krijgt voor mij het raadselachtige genot dat verlangen en nostalgie opleveren, omdat intens verlangen naar en diep nostalgisch terugkijken op een ervaring verrijkend zijn voor die ervaring, vooral voor iemand met de verbeeldingskracht en de elegante pen van Aciman.
En nu las ik dan "Alibi's", een bundel persoonlijke essays van dezelfde Andre Aciman, die allemaal gaan over de smart en het genot van nostalgie en verlangen. Of, anders gezegd, van een geest die nooit helemaal in het hier en nu vertoeft omdat hij droomt van een (grotendeels gefantaseerd) verleden of verlangt naar een (grotendeels onmogelijke) toekomst. De geest van een schrijver die niet zozeer de "dingen zelf" wil afbeelden maar de weerslag van die dingen in zijn altijd dolende geest, niet zozeer de "werkelijkheid zelf" of "de realiteit" maar de al dan niet illusoire associatieve patronen die de schrijver meent te ontwaren in de realiteit. Waarbij die patronen en associaties minstens zo veel zeggen over de schrijver zelf als over de realiteit. Zonder overigens ooit een duidelijk beeld van die schrijver op te leveren, want ook die is een raadsel, een veranderlijke en ondoorgrondelijke verzameling van door nostalgie en verlangen vertekende perspectieven en beelden.
"Alibi's" is een verzameling van persoonlijke, essayistische stukken, die over de meest uiteenlopende onderwerpen gaan: een prachtig stuk over de vele vluchtige en vervlogen werelden die worden opgeroepen door de geur van lavendel; een eveneens prachtig stuk over Proust; mijmeringen over de pluriformiteit van Acimans eigen identiteit en verleden; mijmeringen over aard en waarde van zijn schrijverschap; mijmeringen naar aanleiding van allerlei voor hem belangrijke streken en steden, zoals New York, Venetië, Toscane, Barcelona, Rome, Parijs, Alexandrië. De stukken over steden zijn wel wat wisselend van kwaliteit: sommige zijn wat kort en oppervlakkig, en er sluipen hier en daar ook wat m.i. onnodige herhalingen in. Toch heb ik ook die stukken meestal met plezier gelezen, omdat ze niet op de geijkt-toeristische wijze gingen over de stad of het landschap zelf, maar over de vorm die zij aannemen in Acimans van nostalgie en verlangen doordesemde brein. Of, beter gezegd, de vorm die zij krijgen door Acimans onderzoekende en kunstzinnige schrijversblik. Zo zegt hij: "And perhaps it is the film I go in search of each time I'm back in Rome - not Rome. We seldom see, or read, or love things as they themselves really are, nor, for that matter, do we even know our impressions of them as they really are. What matters is knowing what we see when we see other than what lies before us. It is the film we see, the film that breathes essence into otherwise lifeless objects, the film we crave to share with others. What we reach for and what ultimately touches us is the radiance we've projected on things, not the things themselves - the envelope, not the letter, the wrapping, not the gift". Ook zegt hij: "Lucretius says that all objects release films, or "peeled skins" of themselves. These intimations travel from the objects and beings around us and eventually reach our senses. But the opposite is also true: we radiate films of what we have within us and project them onto everything we see - which is how we become aware of the world and, ultimately, why we come to love it. Without these films, these fictions, which are both our alibis and the archive of our innermost life, we have no way to connect or touch anything".
Wij zien de dingen altijd door het betekenisraster van ons persoonlijke referentiekader: alles wat wij zien is minstens ten dele ook de projectie van ons eigen perspectief, ons eigen ik, ons eigen innerlijk leven, onze nostalgie en ons verlangen. Dat zegt Aciman feitelijk in deze citaten, en daarmee zegt hij niks nieuws. Maar hij zegt en beargumenteert het wel veel eleganter dan ik het ooit zou kunnen, zoals hopelijk uit de citaten blijkt. Bovendien volstaat hij niet met de droge constatering dat "Rome" voor hem alleen het "Rome" is dat bestaat in de film in zijn hoofd. Nee, hij onderzoekt alle facetten van die film, alle elementen van nostalgie en verlangen die Rome in deze film heeft, en zet zijn volle verbeeldingskracht in om associatieve patronen en betekenislagen te ontdekken die deze film nog rijker maken. Ook voor ons is Rome niks meer dan een beeld in de film die wij afdraaien in ons hoofd, maar die film is volgens mij in de regel flink wat saaier dan die van Aciman. Ook voor ons zijn de dingen zelf alleen in onze waarneming gegeven, maar die waarneming is minder met verbeeldingskracht gevoed dan die van Aciman. Wat Aciman dus zegt is niet: ga naar Rome en geniet. Wat hij zegt is: ontplooi ten volle je verbeeldingskracht, doorleef daarbij zonder terughoudendheid alle in jezelf verborgen facetten van verlangen en nostalgie, verrijk op die manier je blik, en kijk met DEZE blik naar Rome of willekeurig welke andere stad. En verwonder je vervolgens over de film, ook lang nadat je hem gezien hebt.
De essaybundel van Aciman lees ik kortom als een mooie en bij vlagen inspirerende exploratie van onze door nostalgie en verlangen getekende geest. Net als zijn romans, zij het op andere wijze en met andere middelen. De essays en romans vertellen geen halleluja-verhaal voor positivo's, want nostalgie en verlangen zijn ook pijnlijk omdat ze gepaard gaan met het besef dat je de dingen zelf nooit helemaal bezit of doorgrondt. Bovendien leiden ze tot het pijnlijke besef dat je ook je eigen stad en land niet kent, evenmin als je eigen ik: dat je zelf nooit meer bent dan een raadselachtige nomade in een onbekend land, temeer omdat je altijd verlangt of terugverlangt naar je eigen thuis maar daar nooit definitief woont. Je bent nooit echt thuis, leeft nooit echt in het moment. En dat pijnlijke besef krijgt bij Aciman alle aandacht. Maar nog meer aandacht krijgt voor mij het raadselachtige genot dat verlangen en nostalgie opleveren, omdat intens verlangen naar en diep nostalgisch terugkijken op een ervaring verrijkend zijn voor die ervaring, vooral voor iemand met de verbeeldingskracht en de elegante pen van Aciman.
May 6, 2020
“We seldom ever see, or read, or love things as they in themselves really are, nor, for that matter, do we even know our impressions of them as they really are...what we reach for and what ultimately touches us is the radiance we’ve projected on things, not the things themselves” (“Intimacy” pg. 33)
“And yet it is the city I’m reaching out for, not people, the city I long to encounter and hold for a while...
The secret language of cities and how even sidewalks, like Sirens, can lure us and speak to us...
...Cummings, Camus — the miracle of intimacy with a place that may be more in us than it is ever out there on the pavement, because there may be more of us projected on every one of its streets than there is of the city itself...
This longing goes out to the city and from the city comes back to us. Call it narcissism. Or call it passion.
...the remanence of our presence, our lingering afterimage on this city — the best in us.
...did I step into an iridescent hot spot where time stopped and I was one with myself and this city?
...this building...behind which lurks the imprint of a life unlived awaiting us...
...Above all, do not take me away.” (“New York, Luminous”)
“And yet it is the city I’m reaching out for, not people, the city I long to encounter and hold for a while...
The secret language of cities and how even sidewalks, like Sirens, can lure us and speak to us...
...Cummings, Camus — the miracle of intimacy with a place that may be more in us than it is ever out there on the pavement, because there may be more of us projected on every one of its streets than there is of the city itself...
This longing goes out to the city and from the city comes back to us. Call it narcissism. Or call it passion.
...the remanence of our presence, our lingering afterimage on this city — the best in us.
...did I step into an iridescent hot spot where time stopped and I was one with myself and this city?
...this building...behind which lurks the imprint of a life unlived awaiting us...
...Above all, do not take me away.” (“New York, Luminous”)
August 29, 2022
For those afflicted with the curse of limitless imagination and for those who rebuild and fabricate their own memories.
February 25, 2017
Read for the ReadHarder challenge 8- Read a travel memoir.... Not your usual travel memoir, this is a gorgeously written collection of essays on place and identity. I loved how personal each essay was, each meditation sharing intimate musings, so specific, so evocative.....
July 18, 2012
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.
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.
March 14, 2017
The essays on Rome, Tuscany, Venice and Paris were my favorite. They were very evocative. I also enjoyed how the author explored his self-identity through travel.
The writing, while lovely, felt almost like a lecture or presentation. It wasn't at all engaging. The tone was a little pretentious, like he felt he travels better because he doesn't go sightseeing or because in Venice he swims at the right time when the light is perfect unlike all the rest of us who swim at the completely wrong times, as if!
It's good, I recommend this to people who love to travel as long as you're willing to overlook a slightly pompous, highbrow tone.
The writing, while lovely, felt almost like a lecture or presentation. It wasn't at all engaging. The tone was a little pretentious, like he felt he travels better because he doesn't go sightseeing or because in Venice he swims at the right time when the light is perfect unlike all the rest of us who swim at the completely wrong times, as if!
It's good, I recommend this to people who love to travel as long as you're willing to overlook a slightly pompous, highbrow tone.
May 28, 2018
I started this book in January and have taken it with me while I travel. His writing evokes certain emotions I feel while I'm elsewhere and enlightens me to look at and pay attention to my surroundings. I find connections. I think introspectively.
"Lavender" and "A Literary Pilgrim Progresses to the Past" are my favorite essays and thus I give it the four star rating for that. Not all the essays were enjoyed, but most contained a line or two that I highlighted for reflection upon a future pick-up from my shelf.
"Lavender" and "A Literary Pilgrim Progresses to the Past" are my favorite essays and thus I give it the four star rating for that. Not all the essays were enjoyed, but most contained a line or two that I highlighted for reflection upon a future pick-up from my shelf.
March 18, 2023
we read this for school. was good. roman hours was godlike. found out my english teacher read call me by your name and we had a good laugh.
January 7, 2023
Andre Aciman knows quite a bit about displacement, as his family were refugees, expelled from Alexandria, Egypt, in the mid-1950s. They first transferred their citizenship to Italy, and then spent several years in Rome, before making their way to the United States. Although he now identifies as American, his writing feels very European to me, as his roving mind and sharp intelligence linger on topics of identity, space, and time.
A friend of his notes that he would rather be in New York dreaming of Paris than be in Paris. He recognizes that this is true, and it is clear that although he is grounded by home and a loving family, he has a restless mind, and catches himself dreaming of other places. Aciman’s explorations of this longing, and its genesis, make up the emotional core of many of the essays found here.
He is at his best when he is discussing place—and I particularly enjoyed the lovely story he tells about the synchronicities of his visit to Bordighera, Italy, in search of Monet’s inspiration (the painter had spent time in the town in the 1880s), and the first, wonderful, chapter on scent and memory. I also enjoyed the personal essays about traveling with his wife and three sons, and one of the later meditations on the impact of the quiet home when the last of his sons leaves for university.
A friend of his notes that he would rather be in New York dreaming of Paris than be in Paris. He recognizes that this is true, and it is clear that although he is grounded by home and a loving family, he has a restless mind, and catches himself dreaming of other places. Aciman’s explorations of this longing, and its genesis, make up the emotional core of many of the essays found here.
He is at his best when he is discussing place—and I particularly enjoyed the lovely story he tells about the synchronicities of his visit to Bordighera, Italy, in search of Monet’s inspiration (the painter had spent time in the town in the 1880s), and the first, wonderful, chapter on scent and memory. I also enjoyed the personal essays about traveling with his wife and three sons, and one of the later meditations on the impact of the quiet home when the last of his sons leaves for university.
August 21, 2020
In some ways, this is a good essay collection to read while one is stuck at home. Throughout the essays, the author is focused on elsewhere, often wanting to be elsewhere, imagining elsewhere, sometimes thinking of places' past and his own past as connected (or disconnected) to place. On the other hand, there is a level of pain associated with reading about the travels of another - to a small Italian town to trace the paths of Monet, to Parisian squares, to Barcelona - when the possibility of one's own travel is on hold for the foreseeable future. Overall, this collection is insightful and is certainly worthy of literature awards. It's also one of those books I really had to work to read, not something I could just get lost in.
January 17, 2022
I want to pop open a bottle of wine, pitch a tent, and camp out in Aciman’s brain. His prose is just stunning, and the way he rolls big ideas in simple relatable narrative hypnotizes you—in a Proustian way, sure, but also the way you hope a great conversation never ends.
I love these essays, and I love every complex, poetic thought Aciman writes.
I love these essays, and I love every complex, poetic thought Aciman writes.
August 7, 2024
A philosophical memoir whose ins and outs are crafted with the scope of someone who observes and purposedly connects the self with every "elsewhere" experienced.
May 23, 2017
Absolutely gorgeous writing. Great essays on memory, being present (not sure if that is even possible), and belonging/existing between time and place.
December 8, 2023
2.5
i was really intrigued to read this book because 1) i found this book in a free little library filled with emails written in the cover and annotations strewn about. 2) i really enjoyed his writing style in his other books i’ve read. specifically the chapter on rome in cmbyn; i fell in love with the idea of rome through this chapter.
the first essays really drew me in. all of the essays center on places and he does a damn good job of romanticizing past places, and reflecting candidly on the romantics.
but halfway through, i was over it. hence, the extremely long read date. i had to push through the last quarter of the essays (but maybe that’s also just my issue with essay collections).
i was really intrigued to read this book because 1) i found this book in a free little library filled with emails written in the cover and annotations strewn about. 2) i really enjoyed his writing style in his other books i’ve read. specifically the chapter on rome in cmbyn; i fell in love with the idea of rome through this chapter.
the first essays really drew me in. all of the essays center on places and he does a damn good job of romanticizing past places, and reflecting candidly on the romantics.
but halfway through, i was over it. hence, the extremely long read date. i had to push through the last quarter of the essays (but maybe that’s also just my issue with essay collections).
August 29, 2021
Aciman saggista è da riscoprire.
Ogni suo saggio è al tempo stesso ricco di autobiografismo, di meditazione sui temi cardine della sua produzione: il ricordo, l'esilio, la letteratura, l'arte, la nostalgia.
Si serve con delicatezza unica di temi e spunti apparentemente banali che, con semplicità, rende nuovi attraverso il suo sguardo.
Inevitabile è la presenza del passato trascorso ad Alessandria, che influenza concretamente l'intera esperienza esistenziale delll'autore.
Egli stesso sostiene che è il ricordo o l'immaginazione, il cui confine è labile, di un altrove a permettergli di apprezzare il qui e ora. Infatti, proprio cogliendo gli aspetti simili, tra Roma e Alessandria, tra Parigi e New York, tra New York e Alessandria stessa, Aciman riesce davvero a sentirsi a casa, o piuttosto, a trovare un senso di familiarità altrimenti inosservato.
Apparentemente è una mera osservazione delle somiglianze.
In realtà è una condizione necessaria.
Qualcosa di cui l'autore non può fare a meno.
Essendo infatti consapevole, fin dall'infanzia, di quanto siano pericolanti le basi della propria "casa/patria/lingua/identità", egli si sforza di rimanere a galla senza affondare in luoghi estranei ma ricercando fuori, in realtà più internamente, le affinità tra i luoghi della sua vita.
È come se l'atto stesso di creare un legame, riflettesse concretamente l'agire continuo della coscienza nel tentativo di plasmare un "io" coerente.
È un processo inevitabile, eppure affascinante e desolante al tempo stesso.
Sembra di risentire l'eco di Orazio, per cui quando si è in un posto si desidera stare altrove. Ma questo non è un capriccio, non è l'incapacità di stare con se stessi, o perlomeno, non totalmente.
È il tentativo di convivere con i pezzi sparsi della propria storia, non solo ricostruendoli ma anche essendone travolti quando riemergono alla memoria.
Si tratta di un punto di vista personalissimo. Un uomo che cerca di rivivere continuamente l'esperienza del suo passato. Che non può e non vuole allontanarsi dai luoghi della sua giovinezza.
L'idea dell'autore è che un presente svuotato del ricordo non sia pieno. Ad arricchirlo è proprio lo sforzo di ricordare, di non dimenticarsi, di aggiungere all'esperienza del qui e ora, tutto ciò che si è stati e tutto ciò che si vuole essere.
Condivido molto dello sguardo di Aciman. Anche nel modo che ha di visitare posti nuovi. Non lasciandosi travolgere dall'ansia frenetica dei turisti che desiderano vedere ogni attrazione, Aciman si chiede quel luogo possa essere adatto alla sua vita.
Guarda una città e cerca di capire se sia un posto in cui possa vivere.
Scova i punti che gli interessano non per fotografarli ma per provarli. Per capire se si sente a suo agio. Se si sente accolto. Se c'è un'intesa con la città, con una piazza, con un quartiere.
L'intimismo della narrazione di Aciman, sicuramente debitore dei suoi studi su Proust, è veicolato da un linguaggio semplice e accessibile.
Non consiglio a chiunque di leggere questa raccolta, bensì a chi ha già letto della narrativa e sia interessato e affascinato dall'autore e dalla sua scrittura.
Città d'ombra è il luogo oscuro del passato nascosto dietro allo sguardo luminoso del presente. È la stessa proiezione del proprio passato, effettuata dalla luce dell'esperienza di adesso. Il lato oscuro di noi che non va dimenticato.
Ogni suo saggio è al tempo stesso ricco di autobiografismo, di meditazione sui temi cardine della sua produzione: il ricordo, l'esilio, la letteratura, l'arte, la nostalgia.
Si serve con delicatezza unica di temi e spunti apparentemente banali che, con semplicità, rende nuovi attraverso il suo sguardo.
Inevitabile è la presenza del passato trascorso ad Alessandria, che influenza concretamente l'intera esperienza esistenziale delll'autore.
Egli stesso sostiene che è il ricordo o l'immaginazione, il cui confine è labile, di un altrove a permettergli di apprezzare il qui e ora. Infatti, proprio cogliendo gli aspetti simili, tra Roma e Alessandria, tra Parigi e New York, tra New York e Alessandria stessa, Aciman riesce davvero a sentirsi a casa, o piuttosto, a trovare un senso di familiarità altrimenti inosservato.
Apparentemente è una mera osservazione delle somiglianze.
In realtà è una condizione necessaria.
Qualcosa di cui l'autore non può fare a meno.
Essendo infatti consapevole, fin dall'infanzia, di quanto siano pericolanti le basi della propria "casa/patria/lingua/identità", egli si sforza di rimanere a galla senza affondare in luoghi estranei ma ricercando fuori, in realtà più internamente, le affinità tra i luoghi della sua vita.
È come se l'atto stesso di creare un legame, riflettesse concretamente l'agire continuo della coscienza nel tentativo di plasmare un "io" coerente.
È un processo inevitabile, eppure affascinante e desolante al tempo stesso.
Sembra di risentire l'eco di Orazio, per cui quando si è in un posto si desidera stare altrove. Ma questo non è un capriccio, non è l'incapacità di stare con se stessi, o perlomeno, non totalmente.
È il tentativo di convivere con i pezzi sparsi della propria storia, non solo ricostruendoli ma anche essendone travolti quando riemergono alla memoria.
Si tratta di un punto di vista personalissimo. Un uomo che cerca di rivivere continuamente l'esperienza del suo passato. Che non può e non vuole allontanarsi dai luoghi della sua giovinezza.
L'idea dell'autore è che un presente svuotato del ricordo non sia pieno. Ad arricchirlo è proprio lo sforzo di ricordare, di non dimenticarsi, di aggiungere all'esperienza del qui e ora, tutto ciò che si è stati e tutto ciò che si vuole essere.
Condivido molto dello sguardo di Aciman. Anche nel modo che ha di visitare posti nuovi. Non lasciandosi travolgere dall'ansia frenetica dei turisti che desiderano vedere ogni attrazione, Aciman si chiede quel luogo possa essere adatto alla sua vita.
Guarda una città e cerca di capire se sia un posto in cui possa vivere.
Scova i punti che gli interessano non per fotografarli ma per provarli. Per capire se si sente a suo agio. Se si sente accolto. Se c'è un'intesa con la città, con una piazza, con un quartiere.
L'intimismo della narrazione di Aciman, sicuramente debitore dei suoi studi su Proust, è veicolato da un linguaggio semplice e accessibile.
Non consiglio a chiunque di leggere questa raccolta, bensì a chi ha già letto della narrativa e sia interessato e affascinato dall'autore e dalla sua scrittura.
Città d'ombra è il luogo oscuro del passato nascosto dietro allo sguardo luminoso del presente. È la stessa proiezione del proprio passato, effettuata dalla luce dell'esperienza di adesso. Il lato oscuro di noi che non va dimenticato.
January 19, 2019
Andre Aciman is such a gifted writer that I feel I'd follow him anywhere. These essays are mostly lapidary gems, nearing Proust in their ability to evoke such specific sensory experiences - the smell of lavendar, the hillside vistas of Tuscany, the unique French order of the Place des Vosges, the warmth of the Barrio Gotic in Barcelona.
Having left his homeland of Egypt for Italy as a boy, Aciman has perfected extraordinary powers of insight and observation about his environs. He recalls places in such vivid detail that you feel yourself right alongside his perambulations, seeking the perfect baguette, a seat on the square to drink coffee and watch the world go by.
His visit to his long-abandoned boyhood neighborhood in Rome recalled (and outshines) my own returns to places we lived in my early year. My father was one of those itinerant Navy officers, and we moved every two years. I tried to visit our old stomping ground outside Pearl Harbor, only to find the entire neighborhood eradicated and rebuilt as anonymous American suburbia.
There are occasional dead spots. The essay on the Place des Vosges, that magnificent French square, seems heavily burdened with the ancient scandals of centuries-gone aristocrats. French court decadence; we got it. This stands out because the others are such polished, faceted short pieces. The remembrances of his father's shaving lotion, and how it has shaped a lifetime of searching for the perfect fragrance, is dazzling and elegant.
All in all, it's a treat to spend time with this most cosmopolitan of travelers.
Having left his homeland of Egypt for Italy as a boy, Aciman has perfected extraordinary powers of insight and observation about his environs. He recalls places in such vivid detail that you feel yourself right alongside his perambulations, seeking the perfect baguette, a seat on the square to drink coffee and watch the world go by.
His visit to his long-abandoned boyhood neighborhood in Rome recalled (and outshines) my own returns to places we lived in my early year. My father was one of those itinerant Navy officers, and we moved every two years. I tried to visit our old stomping ground outside Pearl Harbor, only to find the entire neighborhood eradicated and rebuilt as anonymous American suburbia.
There are occasional dead spots. The essay on the Place des Vosges, that magnificent French square, seems heavily burdened with the ancient scandals of centuries-gone aristocrats. French court decadence; we got it. This stands out because the others are such polished, faceted short pieces. The remembrances of his father's shaving lotion, and how it has shaped a lifetime of searching for the perfect fragrance, is dazzling and elegant.
All in all, it's a treat to spend time with this most cosmopolitan of travelers.
Read
March 31, 2020Reading Aciman always convinces me that I couldn't write my way out of a paper bag with a machete. He has a knack for encapsulating thoughts and emotions in succinct and revealing language that makes one think, "well, yes, of course, that's absolutely the way it is." Part essays, part memoir, Alibis examines moments—moments of intimacy, moments of distress, moments of delight. Even when he observes himself observing (a danger most literary writers flirt with almost constantly), his humor pulls the observations through. "Great artists," he writes, "are those who give us what we think is already ours. The artist converts us; he steals and refashions our past, and like songs from our adolescence, gives us the picture of our youth as we wished it to be back then—never as it really was. He gives us our secret wishfilm back." To which the people say, Amen.
December 15, 2019
I don’t even know where to begin.
André Aciman, thank you. Your book, through its intimate, eloquent words, relieved me of the heavy thought that maybe I was alone in my feelings and my identity.
Through every page I was transported back to moments of my life I look back with bittersweet nostalgia. Aciman recounts days in towns and cities I have felt the strongest emotions in, and provides me with the biggest sense of relief that there are indeed people out there that feel like you do, think like you do and miss a home that maybe never existed like you do.
This is not a book for everyone, but for me, reading this gave me goosebumps - it is intimate, candid, nostalgic and lonely.
André Aciman, thank you. Your book, through its intimate, eloquent words, relieved me of the heavy thought that maybe I was alone in my feelings and my identity.
Through every page I was transported back to moments of my life I look back with bittersweet nostalgia. Aciman recounts days in towns and cities I have felt the strongest emotions in, and provides me with the biggest sense of relief that there are indeed people out there that feel like you do, think like you do and miss a home that maybe never existed like you do.
This is not a book for everyone, but for me, reading this gave me goosebumps - it is intimate, candid, nostalgic and lonely.
April 6, 2018
"I am elsewhere. This is what we mean by the word alibi. It means elsewhere. Some people have an identity. I have an alibi, a shadow self."
Another amazing read from Aciman.
Another amazing read from Aciman.
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