Novelist André Aciman views the world through the lens of Italy | Books

Author André Aciman cares about two things most in the world: love and Italy. 

The country figures into nearly every piece of fiction he has written — some 13 novels, memoirs and essay collections, including the breakout hit “Call Me By Your Name,” which became the Academy Award-winning 2017 movie starring Timothée Chalamet. 

Yet Aciman spent more of his life living in Alexandria, Egypt (as a child) and New York City (as an adult) than he did in Italy. 

“There was something very attractive about girls, beaches, food, wine,” he said, “to the point where you can’t even distinguish which is the one that stirs you the most. Is it Italy or is it the wine? Is it the women? Is it the food?”

Now, his new memoir, “Roman Year,” showcases why his time in Italy was so formative. At the age of 16 and 17, he was awakened to the beauty and hardships of the world. 

“Italy is a place that used to be my home and then I lost it. And of course, having lost it, you want it back,” he said. “It reminds me of all the questions I had as an adolescent.” 

One of these questions, understated in the book, is of sexuality: the most emotionally charged scene in the book is about an intense crush he develops for a man on a bus. 

All of this is set against the violence and expulsions that brought him to Rome. Aciman’s family — Sephardic Jews of Turkish/Italian background — were forced to leave Egypt amid Gamal Abdel Nasser’s crackdown on Jews. They left in 1965, part of the broader post-1956 exodus. His family members were among the lucky ones — as he details later in the book, some relatives faced worse fates. 

“Roman Year” is overall a romantic book, with deep admiration for Italy as a place and as an idea, which extends into his other new book, a novella collection called “Room on the Sea.” In this collection, three stories explore love and heartbreak in many forms. In the standout story, “The Gentleman from Peru,” a mysterious older man knows too much about a group of young travelers, set on Italy’s Amalfi coast. 

Aciman will appear at the Wisconsin Book Festival to discuss both “Roman Year” and “Room on the Sea” in conversation with Erika Meitner on Saturday, Oct. 25 at the Wisconsin Book Festival’s Fall Celebration.

Your time in Rome was so formative. If you could, would you tell your younger self to stop complaining and stop struggling? Or is struggle part of the transformation? 

I would certainly not tell him, “Would you please accept that you’re in Rome and that this is a privilege that is never going to be awarded to you ever again? So take advantage. Enjoy it.” No, of course not. If I were that young man today, I would still be complaining. And because I complain, that’s who I am. 

You wrote about living in a place with so much mythology and history embedded into it. Did you feel like that had an impact on you wanting to mythologize that year and create your own myth around it? 

When I was in Egypt, I knew that I was going to live on a particular street and that the streets adjacent to it were called Via Enea, which is named after Aeneas, and there was Via Clelia, and there was Via Muzio Scevola, which is the history of a man who burnt his hand on purpose because he missed killing the king. And there’s Via Eurialo and Via Niso. All these are wonderful streets that have Virgilian names. 

When I arrived in Rome, those were the streets that were the most ugly. I couldn’t even understand what they had to do with each other. So any ability I would have had to build a mythology around the city or the neighborhood was completely eviscerated. It was not the Rome I wanted. 

Eventually I found another Rome, but it was different and it allowed me to create my own mythology. And that’s the Rome that I go to see nowadays when I go back. 

Is nostalgia the lens that you always write through? 

I like to invoke the past. When I’m walking down the street, say, in New York, it’s beautiful weather, it’s sunny, I would say, but this makes me think of what it was like in Paris. I cannot avoid doing that. I wish I could avoid that. Be in the moment, as so many of my friends tell me to be. 

But I’m the guy who wrote “Homo Irrealis” (essays about what could have been, broadly). In other words, you’re always elsewhere. You’re never in the present. I don’t know how to be in the present. I don’t even like people who live in the present tense. 

Do you feel like you have different selves when you’re writing in different forms? 

Yes. Different forms automatically bring out a different kind of self. In a novel, or in a memoir even, you bring out a different, more emphatic presence of the self. The self is always there. 

It’s always there, and it’s going to seek out the moment when it’s going to give you its attitude, its voice, its edge. They may be different people, but they all share the same base, the same thoughts. 

You write a lot about love and misunderstanding in the memoir. Do you think misunderstanding and the idea of love are inherently connected? 

Do we ever understand others, let alone ourselves? I have never been able to guess anybody’s thoughts. I might project some of my thoughts and hope I’m right, but by and large, I don’t find myself ever right in assessing what somebody else is, who somebody else is. And I find that that’s true about myself, too. I thought I knew myself. But I didn’t know myself at all. 

I think misunderstanding is part of life. Nobody really understands anybody else. They all try to interpret and to guess what somebody else’s desires are, and you always get it wrong. 

Do you think that’s what draws you to write about romantic love? Is that the closest people can get to understanding each other? 

I think it is the closest they can get. I think it’s lucky when they understand each other 90% of the time. That’s really, really lucky.