Three Novellas by André Aciman – Compulsive Reader

Reviewed by David Brizer

Room on the Sea: Three Novellas
by André Aciman
Farrar, Straus, Giroux
June 2025, 261 pages, Paperback, ISBN-13: 978-0374613419

My first encounter with an André Aciman story took place in a mine sweep I was conducting among the 50 + archival years of The Paris Review.

Aciman’s story, an early story, right away hit a nerve, a good nerve: it was bold, brashy, super-intelligent, very much in the Gordon Lish-y manic rant mode I had come to know and expect from this rarified echelon of writers.

Aciman’s new book, Room on the Sea: Three Novellas, is dissimilar in tone but does not disappoint. Here we have an older Aciman, a broadened, somewhat wizened avatar, speaking in a voice more appropriate to wistfulness, memory, regret.

The first of the three novellas, ‘The Gentleman from Peru,’ comes with standard elegiac gear: high-minded folks, some in couples, spending what could well be the best season of their lives dining, drinking, inhaling bounteous nature and repartee, on the Amalfi coast.

Shades of Gustave von Aschenbach, of Great Herr Settembrini’s ghost! In this tale, a group of traveler-friends gather to toast the here and now. The round table’s imagination is wholly captured not just by sensibility, nor by the pursuit of pederastic dreams (as in the Thomas Mann novella.) The champion here is a gentleman from Peru, who over the course of days, conversations and unearthly gastronomic delights, clobbers the sensibilities of his friends with his ability to read them and their futures, thoroughly, presciently, inside and out. Not only that; he makes a convincing case for synchonicities, for the possibility of parallel universes and lives beyond telling. All this in the service of beshaert, of driving home the point that soul mates are out there, waiting somewhere in space and time, waiting to be reclaimed…or entirely passed by. Deep feelings matter — forever.

These overwrought overthinking characters, some dubious, some convinced at the get-go by the gentleman’s parlor tricks, are epic romantics. You might even say emotional vampires. Back and forth between alternate lives on the Amalfi coast, and in New York City (where London Terrace apartments and the High Line figure mightily), these folks dive deep into their projections and unslaked thirst for completion.

The second tale, ‘Room on the Sea,’ likewise shuffles between a contemporary New York and a fantasied ourobouros of blissful lovemaking on the Italian coast. A left-brained attorney (lives on Manhattan’s Upper East Side) matches hearts and wits with an Upper West Side psychologist, both recruited for jury duty in the ponderous heat-choked courts of downtown Manhattan. Both are at odds with their respective marriages, both doubting, looking, wondering. So it’s no surprise that over the course of very few days, and repeated lovely encounters over Chinese food, early morning breakfast takeout, and at Pirra’s Cafe, they warm up, in fact get inflamed, in fact take the plunge, at the prospect of what Still Might Be.

This summary does little justice to the high-flying sentiment and excoriating soul searching that emerge. This reader found himself marooned on a promontory of thought. What was up with these two, with their intransigent regret for a love that might have been? You read the story and question the very fundament of ‘romantic love’: is romantic love transference? Or is it unfulfilled fantasy? Or is it that rara avis, heaven forbid, The Real Thing?

The jury, as they say, is out. Which does not prevent the indefatigable pair from coupling, not only physically but etherically too. They seize the life that (they believe) should have by all rights been theirs.

‘Marisa’ is a contemporary retelling of a 1649 novel ‘The Portuguese Letters,’ which was about the very chaud feelings of a nun for an aristocrat.

‘Marisa’ is a prolonged caterwaul, a limbic rant of desertion and abandonment, by a woman who simply can’t get enough. In one purple passage after another, she describes the abasement and abnegation of self she will gladly experience in exchange for one more hour, one more day, at the hands of her suitor. (Taken to the extreme, this kind of self-abrogation tends ultimately to the soul sacrifice and soul murder popularized, say, in Pauline Reage’s Story of O.)

What does André Aciman’s real life wife think of these tales, particularly the first two? Students of literature know that our conceptions of romantic love are, strictly speaking, historically- and culturally-bound: the arrows of Cupid were quivered in the transformation from feudal to capitalistic/industrial society. That love, as such, may be a commodity, an expensive fantasy, a pretext for propagation, for swelling the ranks of the working class.

André Aciman’s art in these novellas is this: his willingness to relish one great long last look at the thing, at the wormwood of romantic love, before settling into the more formidable routine of feeding pigeons in the park, and navigating Zimmer frames.

About the reviewer: David Brizer is a Bronx-based book critic and author, His most recent novel, The Secret Doctrine of V.H. Rand, was published by Fomite in 2024.