Review: André Aciman’s formative year in Rome
(iStock)As of this writing, more than half a million people have already passed through the “Holy Door” at St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome in honor of this year’s Jubilee of Hope. Rome is, as a result, flooded with tourists, and as my colleague Gerard O’Connell reports, the torrent is not expected to end anytime soon.
Jaded travelers might be forgiven for crossing Rome off their destination list this year. Luckily, we have a new book from the novelist and memoirist André Aciman chronicling his formative year in Rome as a teenager. If you don’t want to travel to Rome, try Roman Year instead.
Aciman is perhaps most well-known for writing the novel Call Me By Your Name, which became a popular film directed by Luca Guadagnino and starring Timothée Chalamet. I also had the good fortune to take a class from Professor Aciman in college (though we have not been in touch since). The subject was Proust, and as his new memoir reveals, he remains a Proustian at heart.
Aciman’s earlier memoir, Out of Egypt, chronicled his family’s life in Alexandria over three generations. As Jewish émigrés in Egypt, they were never given full citizenship and were forced to leave when political tensions escalated under President Gamal Abdel Nasser. And so, in 1966, they landed in Rome, where they had relatives and where his father, who worked in textiles, hoped to find a job.
His father did not join them at first, so it was left to his mother, who was deaf, to parent two teenage sons alone. The family did have relatives in Rome, notably Uncle Claude, who loved the city and who told them that “one needed more than one lifetime” to enjoy it. “No nostalgia, please,” he advised his family. “If you have any regrets, it’s that you should have left Egypt sooner.”
The family lived in an apartment on Via Clelia, far from the neighborhoods that Aciman hoped to explore. “I wanted the Rome of movies, of grand monuments, of beautiful women turning their heads to smile at young men my age,” Aciman writes. “But that Rome was nowhere in sight, maybe never existed. Instead, this was black-and-white Rome, like the films shot in Rome in the mid-fifties and early sixties.”
Still, Rome comes alive in these pages: the televisions that played loudly from his neighbors’ windows; the street vendors who began setting up before dawn; the two local prostitutes working out of a storefront. This may not be the Rome of Rick Steves, but it is true to one boy’s experience at a particular moment in time. And any great city has thousands of stories to tell.
Slowly, Aciman starts to explore his new home. His family enrolls him in a school across town, which requires a long morning bus ride. He hates it at first, but his commute allows him to see a different Rome, and he warms to its charms. After school, before he boards the bus for home, he lets himself wander: “It was during those evenings as I strolled along its streets that Rome came to mean something as uncharted and intangible as desire itself.” (The New Yorker has dubbed Aciman a “grammarian of desire”; I’d love to see that on a business card.)
Aciman’s favorite part of the city was the centro storico, where the city’s eras bumped into one another: “I liked the old because the past held deeper sway, spoke to me more, because, just like me, it trusted not things but their long shadow, their passage, not what was living but had once lived and never died.” Ah, the Eternal City.
Two themes charmed this reviewer. For a boy of just 15 or 16, Aciman was a ferocious reader. Every week he was given money to buy a new book, and it is astonishing what he read over the course of a year. Stendhal. Virginia Woolf. James Joyce. In fact, Aciman credits Rome with making him a lifelong lover of literature: He was so unhappy there at first that he spent hours holed up in his room, tearing through novels.
Aciman starts to really explore Rome when he is allowed to borrow his friend’s bicycle. He discovers that he isn’t as far from the center of the city as he had thought. A journey that takes 30 minutes by bus takes only 10 minutes by bicycle. He loves getting lost on side roads, knowing that he would eventually find his way back to a familiar avenue. His joy of discovery is palpable and will resonate with even the casual Citi Bike rider.
Aciman’s parents had a complicated relationship. When his father could not find work in Rome, he moved to Paris, in part to keep some distance from his mother. Aciman visits his father and, unlike with Rome, he falls in love with the city immediately. He is bewitched by the Champs-Élysées, and the city stirs something in him. Sex, like the city itself, becomes a new territory for exploration.
There is also, in Paris, a Rosebud moment. One evening Aciman wanders through a bookstore with his father, who buys him the first volume of Remembrance of Things Past. In Roman Year, the influence of Proust can be found on almost every page.
For Aciman, it is not the taste of a madeleine but the smell of fresh almonds that brings him back to the evenings he would share with his family, passing around the nutcracker. “Much as I hated life on Via Clelia,” he writes, “being taken back there through the senses summons great joy, something I still don’t understand but have grown to accept as one of the most pleasurable inlets to memory.”
What do these moments mean, and why do they bring us joy now, even when we hated them then? Aciman, appropriately, quotes a line from Virgil familiar to any Latin student, or Springsteen fan: Perhaps it will please us some day to remember these things.
This is the credo of his book, and of any memoir really. Looking back at our past, even those moments that brought us pain or heartache, can be therapeutic and even pleasurable. For Aciman, it is the act of writing that summons this joy. Reviewing the past serves as a sort of Examen for the soul.
Aciman only lived in Rome for a year; new adventures awaited in (where else?) the Bronx. With help from relatives, he applied to several schools in the United States, and when he was accepted at the Bronx campus of Hunter College, his whole family moved across the ocean. His father didn’t want to leave Europe, but he did.
Decades later, Aciman returned to the Via Clelia with his young family in search of the spark of memory. He hoped to find the local grocery store, but it was gone. For a brief moment, he could picture his mother at the stove, his brother returning from basketball practice, but then he lost it. He tried again, years on, when he visited his old apartment. Nothing.
It was only later that night, writing in his diary, that “everything and everyone came back to me.”
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