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Three Novellas
by Andre Aciman
Book Reviewed by:Three hypnotic novellas about obsessional love, missed connections, and enduring regret by the bestselling author of Call Me by Your Name.
The short fictions in Room on the Sea deal with the heart-wrenching vicissitudes of amorous ambivalence, in André Aciman's inimitably nostalgic, lyric style.
"The Gentleman from Peru" tells the story of the life-changing encounter of a group of friends with an enigmatic solitary guest in a hotel on the Amalfi Coast. "Room on the Sea" is a dialogue between a man and a woman who meet on jury duty and embark on a complex relationship. "Mariana" is a modern retelling of a famous seventeenth-century novel about a love affair between a nun and a swashbuckling, unreliable aristocrat.
No one writes about the ups and downs, the yeses and nos, of contemporary love like Aciman. As The Times (London) writes: "You don't so much read André Aciman's novels as tumble breathlessly into them."
Chapter One
"Perhaps this might help," said the stranger. He walked over to their table and touched Mark on the shoulder. "Just breathe deeply and count to five." They'd been seeing him for at least three days, sitting across from them at a corner table in the hotel's dining area by the pool. Always keeping to himself, occasionally exchanging a few short pleasantries with the tall, white-haired waiter, otherwise very quiet and reserved.
Though he always sat alone, he never brought anything to read with him—just a green Moleskine notebook, which he kept open upside down like a diminutive camping tent; a tiny black, clipless fountain pen; and a pair of glasses, which he tossed on the table with total disregard for how they landed on the tablecloth, as though still denying that he needed them. He was in his early sixties, and looked dapper, slim, and always buoyant in his well-pressed double-breasted navy seersucker jacket, linen shirt, and silver-gray tie, topped by a vibrant-colored...
"Room on the Sea" explores the paradoxical intimacy between strangers; part of the appeal is "knowing that this could end in a matter of minutes," which preserves the fantasy of romance and a "shadow life" away from the banality of their jobs, their marriages, their real lives, while "Mariana" elucidates the more ugly and selfish parts of unrequited love... these three novellas are representative of both Aciman's character-driven writing and his interest in human connection across personal and historical time...continued
Full Review
(957 words)
(Reviewed by Isabella Zhou).
In the final novella of Room on the Sea, Aciman has Mariana, a student and scholar, relive her ill-fated love affair with Itamar, a womanizing painter also staying at the Italian Academy, by writing him a letter. In fact, this story is a reimagining of a story of another Mariana, one with a centuries-old literary precedent: Mariana Alcoforado, a Portuguese nun who lived in the 17th and 18th centuries, who was long thought to be the author of a set of "Portuguese Letters."
Alcoforado was baptized in 1640 in Beja, Portugal, and came from a wealthy and land-owning family. When she was a teenager in 1656, she entered the local convent of Nôtre Dame de la Conception. (This was to ensure her safety during a conflict with Spain that ...
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