Review: Aciman’s new book on love, loss and second chances

Special to Charleston City Paper  |  As slow, sultry tides roll through the Lowcountry this June, so will a literary voice attuned to the rhythms of memory and longing. Charleston readers will soon have the rare opportunity of hearing from André Aciman—acclaimed author of Call Me by Your Name and Out of Egypt—as his newest book, Room on the Sea: Three Novellas, arrives in time for his local appearance on June 26.

Known for his lush, introspective prose and his gift for capturing the bittersweet ache of yearning, Aciman returns here with a collection that feels both familiar and freshly resonant. Room on the Sea is wise and luminous, exploring the tender, elusive space between what was and what might still be. The three novellas trace Aciman’s enduring themes—memory, desire, and the exquisite pain of missed connection—while deepening his meditation on love across the decades of a life. 

Each story presents characters poised at different thresholds: the mysterious Raúl in “The Gentleman from Peru,” who may possess supernatural gifts while nursing a forty-year-old heartbreak; Catherine and Paul in “Room on the Sea,” two married strangers who meet during jury duty and discover an unexpected intimacy; and the narrator of “Mariana,” consumed by unrequited passion in an Italian artists’ academy.

The book’s centerpiece, “Room on the Sea,” is perhaps the most emotionally immediate of the three. Catherine and Paul, thrown together in the enforced quiet of the courtroom’s holding pen, recognize in each other both possibility and risk. Their connection unfolds with the particular poignancy available only to those who understand how finite life has become. 

“There is no Maybe next time,” Paul reflects. “There is no next time left. This is the next and last time.” In Aciman’s hands, a coffee shop, a walk in the rain, or a glance across a cafeteria table becomes charged with significance. “Sometimes a random moment occurs,” Catherine notes, “and then you realize that it came with a small halo.” These halos are not miracles, but apertures—brief openings in the fabric of the every day that offer a glimpse of the unlived life, the path not taken, and the question that haunts so many of Aciman’s characters: Is it too late?

In “The Gentleman from Peru,” Aciman stretches the boundaries of realism, introducing a shimmer of the metaphysical in Raúl, an elegant older man whose uncanny knowledge of the past unsettles a group of vacationing Americans. What begins as a party trick—a miraculous healing, a guessed birthday—deepens into a meditation on alternate selves, parallel lives, and the wounds we carry without knowing. 

“[O]ur life is filled with shadow-selves,” Raúl says, “who continue to tag along and to become us in all directions…clamoring to have their say, their time.” Though the tilt of the uncanny might initially seem at odds with Aciman’s typically grounded emotional realism, Raúl’s otherworldly gifts serve to enhance the author’s central concern: that certain connections feel inevitable, and the truest among them may exist just outside the grasp of ordinary reality.

The final novella, “Mariana,” is the collection’s most devastating, a raw, spiraling confession of a woman undone by love. Inspired by the 17th-century Portuguese Letters, the story follows a modern narrator, a young graduate student at an artists’ academy in Italy, who is thrust into a searing awareness of love’s darker, more corrosive dimensions.