Roman Year

By André Aciman

Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2024

André Aciman has written one enormously famous novel, Call Me By Your Name, and a handful other others (including the minor melodramatic masterpiece Eight White Nights), but he’s written more nonfiction than fiction, and his latest book, Roman Year, adds to his surprisingly long list of intensely personal travel memoirs. This is the story of his memories of his adolescence, haunting the alleyways and bookshops of Rome once his family landed there from Egypt. 

The potential perils of such a book are as obvious to ordinary readers as they are invisible to egomaniacal authors, mainly that with the possible exception of Casanova, nobody’s adolescence is anywhere near as interesting as Rome in the gaudy era of La Dolce Vita. Readers will be polite with lines like “How right was Aunt Flora” or “I had my first-ever prosciutto e melone appetizer that day and didn’t understand the combination: I liked melons and prosciutto but not together” … but their politeness will have its limits. Roman Year is 350 pages long, after all. 

Fortunately, Aciman isn’t merely turning the yellowed pages of a family album, and his storytelling skills, always at their sharpest and least self-indulgent in his nonfiction, hardly ever desert him here. 

Instead, readers are drawn into a world in which the streets and squares of a largely-vanished Rome are almost completely overlaid with a strange translucent world of books and reading. There’s plenty of family drama, at its most unsparing when dealing with the author’s father. “I did not want him to see through me, just as I feared seeing through him,” he writes, but even in such passages the literary is virtually inextricable from the biographical, as he continues, “But I was like him, and the characters I liked most in novels were like the two of us: transient, tentative, and irresolute.” 

These life-anecdote elements, however, are regularly buried in layers of something else, regularly bundled in authors and chapters and the furtive rush of the adolescent intellectual life. “My Rome was the bookshops, and, between them, a network of narrow, cobbled streets lined by ocher walls and refuse,” he writes, adding with the outsider’s wistfulness that infuses much of the book, “The piazzas with their centered obelisks, the museums, the churches, the glorious remnants, all these were for other people.” As the pages turn, the whole thing increasingly feels like the kind of surreal, poetic memoir that Octavio Paz might have written. 

Aciman is not a polyphonic author. Fiction or nonfiction, he tends to choose a handful of notes for any work and then hit those notes with an insistent repetition from beginning to end (indeed, sometimes in the form of an actual repeated mantra, as in Eight White Nights). This is certainly true in Roman Year, in which Aciman stresses the narrative elements of readerly intoxication and societal alienation by returning to those elements so often that readers would be well and truly sick of them in the hands of a less talented writer. “I learned to read and to love books much as I learned to know and to love Rome,” Aciman writes, in one way or another, at dozens of points throughout the book, “not only by intuiting undisclosed passageways, but by seeing more of me in books than there probably was, because everything I read seemed more in me than on the pages themselves.” 

Ultimately, it’s weirdly convincing. When Aciman recalls his younger self stumbling out of bookshops late in the evening, dazed by a thousand interior adventures, decanted into Roman streets “in search of vague smiles and fellowship in a city I wasn’t even sure existed outside of the pages I read,” readers will feel a touch of that same disorientation, wonderfully.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News