BookBrowse Reviews Room on the Sea by Andre Aciman

BookBrowse:

The three novellas in this collection are heartfelt love stories featuring chance encounters, fated meetings, and characters who get swept up in idealized Italian summertime seascapes.

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"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.

This review first ran in the July 30, 2025 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.