By Seth Sawyers
The first impression you may get after reading André Aciman's collection of essays, False Papers , is that, wow, this guy is capable of some serious remembering. In these 14 personal essays, we find the writer, say, picnicking in one of New York's tiny parks, the city's bustle surrounding him, and then wham, something gets triggered and he's knee-deep in his vast memory warehouse. In an essay called “Square Lamartine,” he even remembers remembering. He remembers standing in the same spot in Paris years before, doing the same thing, remembering the same memory.
“People will ask me to write something,” Aciman said recently from his home in New York, “and a month before the talk, I realize I need to sit down and do it. I will have an experience a week before the deadline that will interest me. I see someone eating a bologna sandwich at a restaurant, and it reminds me of Paris. It's a lever for the bigger thing. What was on my mind, of course, was ‘Andre, you have to write this essay, and what the hell are you going to write about?' I can't think about the essay, I have to think about the past. It's always the past for me. It's my lever.”
The levers he uses to do this remembering—a tiny square of benches, a fountain and statue in the wonderful essay “Shadow Cities”— trigger glimpses of places he wished he could go back to. A statue reminds him of Rome. A strip of the sea reminds him of the French coast. He's collected, in these essays, enough memories so that we understand what he means when he wonders “why, unlike the body, which sheds everything, the soul cannot let go of anything but compiles and accumulates, growing annual rings around the things it wants and dreams of and remembers.” Remembering, then, is a process that is “the opposite of molting.”
Aciman's whole world (past and present) lives in his head. He's an exile, through and through. He's never had a home. Home is not New York, though he's lived there for 30 years. (“Home is de facto New York,” he said on the telephone. “And that's that.”) Alexandria (the anti-Jewish, nationalistic government forcing his family to leave in 1965 is the subject of his memoir, Out of Egypt ) comes the closest, but it's not “home” in the same manner of Steinbeck's California or even Marquez's magical Macondo. Aciman spends so much time thinking about and looking for a home in these essays—the runners-up include Rome and Paris—that the reader may now and then want him to pick a new place to call home, already.
“There's a part of me that's done that,” he said of finding a substitute home. “And it's wrong. France, for me, really is the ideal home. But I can't stand it for more than a week. It's like when you're dating one girl and your heart is with the other girl, and you know deep down that's it's not right. When you don't have a home, you're always a fraud, because you're always disloyal.”
For Aciman, the other girl is always Alexandria. It's the city that comes up again and again, and because it's around every corner, the city takes on a magical feel, a paradise that tricks the author into thinking he wants to return. He doesn't, actually.
“I never liked Alexandria. It's like not liking your grandmother but missing her because she's dead. When life's dealing me a bad hand, my mind goes back to mommy. Will it make me whole again? It will,” he said. “You miss something that you also know you couldn't stand if you had it.”
In the essay most concerned with his heritage, “In A Double Exile,” he laments his historic exile as a Jew and his own personal exile from Alexandria. The very notion of home eludes him.
“Not only do I not know what it is to have a home, I don't even know what it is. It's like asking someone who's never had a mother if he misses his mother,” he said.
Aciman believes his readers don't have to be exiles to empathize.
“Many people understand my book who have never been exiled. So you have to ask why. You're tapping into some form of instability,” he said. “It's a metaphor. It's being away from yourself. We also all understand what it means to be outside yourself. To not be totally inside your body. Your cup's not always in your saucer.”
He calls it “the ellipse.” “It has not one center, but two. If you have two centers, you're in hell, because you are fundamentally condemned to be ambivalent about everything.”
For all that, he claims that he doesn't spend too much time with these ambivalent memories, because they never last long enough. “When you write about these things, you're basically pinning the wings down. It lasts milliseconds. What the essay does is force the memory to acquire more than it has. The job of the writer is to dilate things that other people don't think about. It's a working out of things.”
“Do I walk around all day, every day, just remembering? No. That would be ridiculous. That would make me an idiot,” he said. “On the other hand, there is a part of me that wants to focus on that tiny moment during dinner in someone else's home that made me feel like I was in Paris, for a moment.”
Like many artists who have come to know middle age, he flails against the darkness. In the essay “Underground,” which is about a ghost-like, abandoned subway station, he asks, “What if things didn't have to always disappear?”
“Writing is a process by which you make things stay longer. The admission has a particular power that makes things stay longer. It's about being afraid of dying,” he said. “We're always looking for timelessness.”
Aciman is currently working on a novel, which he stresses is not about memory. “It's about a man and a woman meeting at a party.” A man and a woman who have memories of other places, no doubt.
