André Aciman

André Aciman returns to the essay form in Homo Irrealis to explore what the present tense means to artists who cannot grasp the here and now. Irrealis is not about the present, or the past, or the future, but about what might have been but never was — but could in theory still happen.

From meditations on subway poetry and the temporal resonances of an empty Italian street, to considerations of the lives and work of Sigmund Freud, Constantine Cavafy, W. G. Sebald, John Sloan, Éric Rohmer, Marcel Proust, and Fernando Pessoa, and portraits of cities such as Alexandria and St. Petersburg, Homo Irrealis is a deep reflection of the imagination’s power to shape our memories under time’s seemingly intractable hold.

Aciman's third and most ambitious novel is an elegant and powerful tale of the wages of assimilation-a moving story of an immigrant's remembered youth and the nearly forgotten costs and sacrifices of becoming an American. An Egyptian Jew attending graduate school at Harvard in 1977 meets a brash, charismatic Arab cab driver nicknamed Kalashnikov-Kalaj for short-for his machine-gun vitriol. The student finds it hard to resist his new friend's magnetism, and before long he begins to neglect his studies and live a double life: one in the rarified world of Harvard, the other as an exile with Kalaj, carousing on the streets of Cambridge. As final exams loom and Kalaj has his license revoked and is threatened with deportation, the student faces the decision of his life: whether to cling to his dream of New World assimilation or risk it all to defend his Old World friend. 

This luminous series of linked essays about time, place, identity, and art show Aciman at his very finest. He revisits the romantic state of anticipation, as opposed to arrival, and explores the themes of dispersion, evasion, and ambivalence. From beautiful and moving pieces about the memory evoked by the scent of lavender; to meditations on such cities as Barcelona, Rome, Paris, and New York; to his sheer ability to unearth life secrets from an ordinary street corner, Alibis proves the author a master of the personal essay.

Aciman's novel examines the relationship of two twenty-something New Yorkers. Meeting at a swank Christmas Eve party, the two play out their romance over the course of the seven nights between that party and New Year's Eve. Aciman fills their romance with coffees, wealthy friends in Hudson County, and Rohmer film festivals, and he concocts ever more complex scenarios to dramatize the tension and uncertainty. 

Call Me by Your Name, a frank, unsentimental, heartrending elegy to human passion, is the unforgettable story of a sudden and powerful romance that blossoms between an adolescent boy and a summer guest at his parents' cliff-side mansion on the Italian Riviera. Unprepared for the consequences of their attraction, at first each feigns indifference. But during the restless summer weeks that follow, unrelenting buried currents of obsession and fear, fascination and desire, intensify their passion as they test the charged ground between them. What grows from the depths of their spirits is a romance of scarcely six weeks’ duration and an experience that marks them for a lifetime. For what the two discover on the Riviera and during a sultry evening in Rome is the one thing both already fear they may never truly find again: total intimacy.

This collection of 14 essays by Aciman-the prince of nostalgia" (Susan Salter Reynolds, Los Angeles Times Book Review)-dissects in fine-spun prose the experience of exile, as Aciman describes his forced departure from Alexandria as a teenager, his brief life in Europe, and his present location on Manhattan's Upper West Side. "To those who asked, I said I went back to touch and breathe the past again, to walk in shoes I hadn't worn in years," begins this evocative collection by a stylist some have compared to Proust. Aciman, an expert in seventeenth-century French literature, the contemporary Arab world, modern literature, and philosophy, is also a frequent contributor to The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, The New Republic, and Commentary. His book, Out of Egypt: A Memoir (1995), an account of his Jewish-Turkish-Italian family's life in Alexandria, was called a "a classic memoir of modern Jewish life" by The New York Times.