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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 pocket square.
They had spotted him a few times in the lobby or on the long terrace and had begun wondering about him, probably thinking he was another one of those stereotypical semi-retired Italian gentlemen who'd done well for themselves and who pick a spa in the hills or a beach resort where they vacation, socialize a bit, play bridge at night, and for a few weeks manage to stay away from their wives, mistresses, and grandchildren. But this gentleman didn't socialize, didn't play bridge, hadn't come for the waters or the mud baths, and unlike the other hotel guests, kept asking the waiters to lower the volume of the already muted Vivaldi music piped into the dining area. Once, on heading to what was usually his table, he had thrown a glance in their direction, even given them an imperceptible bow as a passing salutation, but he never uttered a word. They did not return his greeting, feeling that his old-world manner was too chilly and formal for them to know exactly how to respond. Their eyes had simply cast a blank, bewildered stare on his figure, ignoring his distant salutation and trying not to encourage what he might be up to next. "I'm telling you, he's been studying us," said one of them. "Weird," agreed another.
Their table was the busiest and largest in the hotel dining area and occupied the space lining a good portion of the balustrade overlooking the beach and the marina on the left. As soon as they'd shown up the first few times, the waiters had hastily joined together three tables and thrown a long tablecloth over them. Later, after they'd all finished eating and left, the waiters would remove the long tablecloth, crumple it up, and separate the tables again. Eventually, seeing that the cohort never went elsewhere for breakfast or dinner, the waiters decided to leave the tables joined together for the remainder of their stay. They were not the only Americans in the hotel, but the youngest and the loudest. When the two guitarists came round to their table in the evening, the women in their group would suddenly beam, turn to face the players, and laugh as they attempted to hum along with the music. Everyone else in the hotel spoke softly, ate very slowly, and drank far less. The young Americans were the last to leave at night, and, by the time they'd ordered dessert, all the other tables were already being set up for breakfast.
After dinner, most of the aging hotel guests liked to spend their time either lounging in the common area not far from the lobby or playing bridge in the card room. For them, this was not a resort where you came for a few days but where you spent at least three weeks in the hotel and stayed there, socializing with other guests who'd been coming here for years if not decades, and touring the environs a bit only to return for a short swim, then light cocktails and a splendid dinner. The chef, as the hotel staff kept reminding the young signori Americani, was world famous and the author of three bestselling ...
Excerpted from Room on the Sea by Andre Aciman. Copyright © 2025 by Andre Aciman. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
"The Gentleman from Peru," the first of the three novellas that make up André Aciman's new collection, Room on the Sea, follows Margot, an American vacationing on Italy's Amalfi Coast, and Raúl, a clairvoyant expatriate who can see past, present, and future human lives—including his and her own. The story draws the reader in with its subtle, witty observations about American versus European travelers, but what is particularly enchanting are the fantasy elements it interweaves into its otherwise realist setting. When mysterious, "old-world" Raúl initiates conversation with Margot and her American friends, he quickly reveals his psychic abilities—he can intuit secret autobiographies, locate and cure physical pain through touch, and see a single soul's story across multiple lives. Raúl is erudite and philosophical; the lyricism of his language enhances the mystical aura that infuses the Amalfi Coast and is braided into its local history. For example, he recommends that Margot and her friends visit the nearby "entrance to Avernus, the doorway to the world of the dead," which is, he says,
"where all the broken hearts tell their woebegone tales of love to anyone who passes by and cares to listen: Phaedra, who took her own life for loving her stepson after she opened up her heart to him; Dido who lit a fire and threw herself into it while Aeneas watched her burn from aboard his ship to Italy; Procis, who was mistakenly speared by her lover; and poor Caenis, raped by a god and begging to be turned into a man so as never to be raped again. Haven't you all been burnt and speared and raped in your hearts at least once?"
Raúl later arranges a sightseeing tour for just himself and Margot, during which the nature of the deep connection between the two of them is revealed—somewhat unsurprisingly, given Raúl's supernatural abilities. Nonetheless, their push-pull relationship—Margot is suspicious of and even wrathful towards Raúl, who is ever-indulgent and apologetic towards her—is charming for its back and forth and, with the deluge of their interpersonal secrets, finally heartbreakingly tragic.
If "The Gentleman of Peru" opens with broad, global contrasts before narrowing into a duet, the second story, "Room on the Sea," dives into the deep end, immediately indulging in the delights of conversation between two unexpected intimates, an older man and woman who are thrust together by jury duty in New York City. Essentially one extended, week-long conversation, the story consists of the crackling repartee between Paul and Catherine, replete with in jokes created at a moment's notice—at one point, both sensing the lack of closeness they feel with their respective spouses, who also coincidentally share a distaste for cilantro, they begin to hint at "the cilantro situation"—and an atmosphere of undeniable (and, for most of the story, tacit and unspoken) romantic and physical attraction.
"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. For Paul and Catherine, their potential future romance comes to be represented by half-serious, half-fanciful plans for a getaway to Italy: "If I enjoy thinking of Naples too, it's because it's unreal," as Catherine puts it.
As they improvise a cherished routine of their own, eating together at Pierro's cafe and enjoying post-jury walks along the High Line, they also engage in the wistful philosophizing characteristic of Aciman's work, as when Paul explains his desire to visit ancient historical sites. "These things don't go away because they happened more than two thousand years ago," he says. "Nothing goes away, including, as I'm starting to find out, the things we wished had happened but never did."
But the potential of a summer respite in Italy is torn completely asunder in the closing novella, "Mariana," with the titular character's heartbreak at the hands of her philandering suitor, Itamar. "Mariana" reimagines a seventeenth-century affair between a scorned nun and her lover (see Beyond the Book); here, she is a student researching an old novel at an Italian academy, and he is a flirtatious painter.
The story takes the form of a letter from Mariana to Itamar, which she will never send him, recounting their affair with blunt honesty and self-awareness. In this story, Room on the Sea makes a shift from the semi-omniscient, third-person perspective of its first two novellas to the intimate myopia of Mariana's blistering and confessional first person. Mariana acknowledges that she, at least subconsciously, knew their relationship was doomed from the start; she is "sorting through a pile of trifles that take me back to our days together and that I'm embarrassed to have stowed away," she writes, "as though I already knew back then they'd be priceless keepsakes one day."
"Mariana" elucidates the more ugly and selfish parts of unrequited love. Towards Luisa, an employee at the academy who is also in love with Itamar, Mariana expresses a mix of admiration and scorn for how she has silently pined after him for years while watching him rotate through countless women: "She doesn't bad-mouth those she loves. How noble!" Her coming-of-age revelations, rendered in poignant figurative language, will resonate with many; at the crux of her agony over Itamar is the fact that, Mariana writes to him, "It's me I miss, the me I didn't know existed and that you pried out of me like a misshapen mollusk finally eased out of its shameful little slough."
Room on the Sea beautifully depicts the experience of romance and desire and is a fantastic entryway into Aciman's oeuvre, representative of both his character-driven writing and his interest in human connection across personal and historical time.
Reviewed by Isabella Zhou
Rated 4 out of 5
by Cloggie Downunder
A thought-provoking tale filled with gorgeous prose.
Room On The Sea is a novella by Egyptian-born American author, Andre Aciman. On a warm summer Monday, Paul Wadsworth and Catherine Shukoff encounter one another in a Manhattan central jury room. Paul is a retired lawyer, reading the Wall Street Journal while they wait to be sent to a courtroom for jury selection; Catherine is a psychologist who reveals she’s reading Wuthering Heights when she notices Paul’s interest in her reading matter.
While they wait in unairconditioned discomfort (the aircon is not working) they share: Paul offers his foolproof way out of being selected; they chat and enjoy each other’s company; during the lunch break, Paul’s recommendation for a Chinese lunch; whatever the topic, they seem to agree; they like each other’s sense of humour; they arrange to meet for coffee the next morning; they exchange phone numbers; details of their lives; career paths not taken.
They discover a “ships-in-the-night” moment from their youth, and discuss their marriages quite frankly, as each inwardly compares the other to their spouse. They do all they can to ensure they can enjoy each other’s company each day, and they discuss the gloomy prospect that they might not see one another again after their week of juror obligation is up.
As their feelings for each other intensify, they describe the effect of their daily encounters: “I’ve felt young and hopeful again– only to realize that I’d stopped being young and hopeful for so long.” They admit to their unsatisfactory marriages: “… the tiny joke time plays on us: it robs the memory of who we were and what we were able to feel once. As you said, we live with people but totally forget why we’ve chosen to live with them.”
And they consider what might happen if they decide to take it a step further: “There are so many things at stake, all of them possibly quite meagre and frail by now, some downright insignificant. But we’ve built our lives with them and they are who we are, who we’ve been made to be, sometimes even against our will. Where would we be without them?” and they wonder if their relationship would still have the texture of “the casual, improvised meeting that allowed them to feel perfectly natural each time they were thrown together by the court system.” Do they, or don’t they? A thought-provoking tale filled with gorgeous prose.
This unbiased review is from an uncorrected proof copy provided by NetGalley and Faber & Faber
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 began in 1640.)
Here, the ambiguous fact and fiction of "Mariana" begin to mix. Purportedly, when Mariana was twenty-five, she spotted a twenty-nine-year-old French military officer passing beneath her convent window, a site now known as the janela de Mértola (the "window of Mértola") for its panoramic view of the nearby village. This man was Noël Bouton, who later became the Marquis de Chamilly, and he was in Beja for the Portuguese Restoration War. They began a love affair, but with the end of the war and rumors of their liaison threatening scandal, Bouton suddenly abandoned Alcoforado and returned to France.
Devastated, Mariana wrote a series of letters to Bouton heartbreakingly detailing their romance, five of which were published in France in 1669 as "Les Lettres Portugaises" or the "Portuguese Letters." These letters, published anonymously in French, were claimed to be a direct translation of lost originals. Initially accepted as authentic, they were immediately a hit in France for their depiction of a clandestine, forbidden affair involving an unknown nun and for the author's confessional, touching writing style.
But the truth of these letters' authorship has proven to be somewhat convoluted. In 1810, the specific name "Mariana" was attached to them for the first time, when a scholar claimed to have a copy of the originals; before then, their anonymous author had always been known simply as "the Portuguese nun from Beja." More research confirmed that a nun named "Maria Ana Alcoforado" had lived in 1660s Beja, and so she was presumed the author—until new evidence surfaced in 1926 that the real author was Gabriel Joseph de Lavergne, aka "Guilleragues," the original French "translator," that he had fabricated the story behind the letters, and that they are entirely fictional. Most contemporary scholars now accept that Guilleragues holds complete authorship over the "Portuguese letters," although some are still convinced that Alcoforado was, indeed, their true creator. Regardless of Mariana's authorial veracity, the "Portuguese letters" have left an undeniable legacy to literature and the Portuguese cultural imagination, including influencing writers such as Stendhal and Rilke.
The first page of the first edition of Les Lettres Portugaises. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
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