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Bottom of the pile
22
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
26/100Critics
17/100Scholars
Author:
André Aciman
Publisher:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Date:
January 19, 2021
A new collection of essays on literary and cinematic themes.
What The Reviewers Say
Aciman...lives in the past. We know this because every page quivers with a yearning for moments that have long ceased to be. Or perhaps not. He is, in fact, reaching for moments that could have been, should have been, might have been, but have never actually been. This gray wistfulness hovers all over the book.
A slow stroll through entrancing capitals, a tender remembrance of rare old films, a fresh contemplation of Modernist literary giants—this describes the material of André Aciman’s new assortment of essays, but not the magic. The opening pieces in Homo Irrealis for instance, meander through fascinating old downtowns: Alexandria, Rome, and New York. Reading each takes no more time than a small pot of tea—brevity counts among the book’s charms—but none would prove much use as a guidebook. Even a landmark like Rome’s Forum provokes Aciman to meditations more far-reaching, more profound.
The collection hangs somewhere between the story of a writer coming into being and a description of the feeling of aliveness to which a writer may be especially attuned. We see Aciman as a child in Egypt longing for France. We see him then in France longing for the version of France he longed for in Egypt. We see him as a young adult in New York, heartsick, stumbling into showings of Rohmer’s Six Moral Tales. We see him, years later, traveling to Freud’s Rome and Dostoevsky’s St. Petersburg. In these scenes, the act of writing itself—the writer as writer—disappears in a vanishing trick of the irrealis mood.
A collection of essays that explores the imaginative character of experience and the complicated relationship between what we regard as real and what we regard as imaginary.
