‘We were elsewhere people,” André Aciman writes in this memoir of the year he spent in Rome in the mid-1960s. Aged 15, he left Egypt with his deaf mother and younger brother while his father remained in Alexandria to sell whatever they couldn’t take. Aciman’s Jewish family were part of diaspora forced to leave during Gamal Abdel Nasser’s two decades in power, refugees who attempted to start again in Europe and the US.
When they arrive in Rome, the Acimans must rely on the generosity of André’s great-uncle Claude. “I’m no ogre,” he protests (never a good sign), while keeping a record of every lira he gives them. He installs the family in a flat in the working-class Appio-Tuscolano district, previously one of his brothels, and sets about finding a school for André and his brother.
Time and memory, and the longing engendered by being unable to ever truly return to a particular place or period, are Aciman’s obsessions. Call Me By Your Name, the novel that made him famous, is framed as a remembrance, and Oliver, the PhD student with whom the teenage narrator Elio falls in love, is writing a dissertation on Heraclitus, who taught that you can’t step in the same river twice. Aciman arrives at these same concerns in My Roman Year but takes his time getting there, and the first half of the book presumes too much interest from the reader about which school will accept the Aciman boys, and how many buses it will take them to get there.
Repetition and redundancy in the writing don’t help. I enjoyed Aciman’s description of his cousin speaking at a family event in the “quadrilingual idiolect of our boisterous Alexandrian years” – a mixture of French, Arabic, Italian and English – but reading less than a page later that everyone was speaking “our Alexandrian medley of words from many tongues lumped together” makes you wonder where the editor has got to. Aciman also seems oddly addicted to telling us there are things he has never forgotten: “I never forgot that shove”; “I will never forget that fateful evening”; “I’ll never forget our itinerary that early morning”, and so on. Surely something’s presence in a memoir is evidence enough of it not having been forgotten. And too often it seems a detail is present not because it is remarkable but simply because it has been remembered.
The book improves hugely in its second half, after André, in Paris for Christmas, visits a sex worker and returns to Rome determined – and able – to seduce. “Something was telling me that I could sleep with every woman on the planet if I wanted,” he writes, and if that proves an overestimation he still succeeds with two of his neighbours on Via Clelia, a schoolgirl and a seamstress twice his age. But he also falls for a young man, Gianlorenzo, who works at a nearby shop. This attraction, confusing but not unwelcome, inspires some of Aciman’s best writing, including an erotic dream in which “I drifted from him to her, back to him and then her, each feeding off the other and, like Roman buildings of all ages snuggling into, on top of, under, and against each other, body parts stripped from his body given over to hers and then back to his with body parts from hers. I was like Emperor Julian, the apostate who buried one faith under the other and no longer knew which was truly his.”
Lovers, or potential lovers, performing their uncertain dance: this is where the tedium burns off and the book grips. André reading Lawrence Durrell’s Justine on the Spanish Steps; lying in the darkness of a lover’s bedroom on a bright, hot day; standing on the brink of telling Gianlorenzo his feelings – through these experiences he comes to love the city that for so long he loathed, and was desperate to leave. Years later he tries to return, but the river has moved on. The only place where that time and those people now exist is in the pages of this book.
• My Roman Year by André Aciman is published by Faber (£22). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
