![]() ![]() The plot is fairly simple: A Harvard graduate student named Oliver comes to stay with an academic expat family in the Italian Riviera, where he will oversee the translation of his dissertation on Heraclitus. How strange, then, that Aciman’s first novel, Call Me by Your Name, should run against the Proustian grain. ![]() But the best essays are those in which Aciman imports Proust to his various homes in Cairo, Rome, New York, and Cambridge, Massachusetts. Later in the same essay, he makes the pilgrimage to Illiers-Combray only to be predictably underwhelmed (as Marcel was by his much-longed-for Venice). In his remarkable collection of essays, False Papers (2000), Aciman tells how his father first bought him Swann’s Way when he was fifteen (“I already knew I had just received, perhaps without my father’s knowing it, his dearest, most enduring gift of love”). Even more than Roger Shattuck, who’s championed Proust in scholarly works, or Alain de Botton, who’s promoted Proustian self-help, Aciman has taken to heart the author’s injunction to use In Search of Lost Time as a personal darkroom-to dip the negatives of one’s own memories into the magic solution Proust provides. André Aciman is our consummate Proustian. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |