3 best books by André Aciman

Under the fascination for Marcel Proust, the writer André Aciman traces his particular bibliography loaded with a similar residue that ends up spreading ideas such as arguments and passions as complete plots.

Because discover that kind of immortality that manages to transmit Proust in the cadence of such vital works as "In Search of Lost Time", it ends up stinging like the incurable poison for creativity.

And so André Aciman also immerses himself in the fruitful universe of love until obsession, from slow fermentation until reaching maximum degrees of essential humanism in intimate spheres that make us blend in with life in a fascinating impressionism of the subjective. There where the measure is adjusted, the balance between emotions and reason.

The trip is always enriching, understood mainly as the necessary empathy that takes our gaze away from our navel and offers us new, much more complete visions.

Few authors manage to make prose that perfect channel for a reading that flows dynamically between curiously reflective actions. Because any movement starts from the drives, from the most internal desires. And where our engines wake up, they burn all our dreams, frustrations, fears and hopes.

Top 3 recommended novels by André Aciman

Call me by your name

The desire on Oliver person seems to want to lead Elio to inhabit his skin, to pretend to be the owner of his cells, to conquer from the name to the scent of the young visitor to his house. Since Oliver arrived at his house, invited by his father as a cultural exchange, Elio's life began to revolve around the inhabitant of his house who little by little also inhabits his dreams.

Nothing will be the same for Elio since Oliver entered the scene. And nothing better said because Elio will become the character in the libretto of his passions. In his interpretation we are immersing ourselves in the reality of the motives to love, in the mutant, histrionic egoism, in the desire capable of overriding any other instinct. The limited time frame, the few weeks ahead for Elio to get close to Oliver serve that impression of peremptory nature of the most intense passions.

Elio's house is not Oliver's place. And everything will disappear and those days will not be able to mark a future or of course eternity. But precisely for this reason, Aciman uses the hours counted so that the emotions served remain always valid and distil to us, with spiritual suggestion, the best of the first sips of the passions that are never forgotten and that end up becoming physical to the point of pain. .

Call me by your name

Enigma variations

Nothing heavier, compared to the light and disturbing sensation of our existence, than the concatenation of people who are loved. What is the same our book of love.

And Paul has his, the one that writes on the skin, leaving wounds or bristling the skin. The greatest virtue of the wise narrative composition of Paul's story is the sensuality once again distilled to its highest degree. Love is the subjective value par excellence and Paul uncompromisingly teaches us his way of understanding what he loved and what he still loves. A subtle golden thread unites past and present loves, its brilliance passes from one continent to another, from Europe to America.

Those are the enigma variations, the compositions that weave together the knots of a love made passion, devotion, desire or loss. In each moment love discovers what Paul was and what he really is when the burden of circumstances insists at times to bury the essence. Without forgetting that what is remains more in the impression of others than in one's own conscience. Even more so in the case of a character in a novel, of which each of us composes a different symphony from the base of a word, love, which cascades into countless possibilities.

Enigma variations

Eight white nights

Aciman grants Henry four nights more than Dostoyevsky to its protagonist of "White Nights". But in essence the souls of these two characters are perfectly in tune.

The illusion of love materialized by chance, between the fear that it may or may not end up being real. From St. Petersburg to Manhattan. From the reality of clear summer nights with hardly any night to other nights in white, those that Henry will live between Christmas and the New Year of a New York besieged by a cold that contrasts with Henry's feverish heat. Because she, Clara, has come to occupy everything in her gray existence. A casual presentation that seems like that change of record of destiny that seems to finally offer an opportunity. But perhaps Henry does not feel capable of taking advantage of his fortune, or at worst he thinks that advancing with Clara could end up transforming beauty into his despicable daily life.

A gray guy like him can dye the most splendid range of colors. But the nascent love marks his inertia between uncontrollable obsessions and Henry lets himself be carried away by that force that leads him back to Clara. Eight nights for a new year to dawn and perhaps a new love. Fears about the future that, paradoxically, ignite more passion, the romantic notion that still fits with its old taste of melancholy. A love story told as only the great writers know how to do it, marking the path towards existence, towards the transcendent, without frivolity and loading each scene with meaning, dialogues and powerful reflections.

Eight white nights

Other recommended books by André Aciman

Homo unrealis

Every author always has the time to do metaliterature towards the metaphysical from the soul. Something like an introspection exercise that locates the author in the world but also the complete human being. Counting for this with the option of impersonating anyone who reads the work as a writer. Writing is asking questions. Sometimes the time comes to answer the thickest ones. The only weapons are memories and experiences towards some kind of wisdom.

How much of us is erased over time? How long does he stay in loved places? Can you return to a place that never existed beyond your mind? In Homo irrealis, André Aciman invites us to accompany him to the territory of his memories on a journey through beloved places such as Alexandria, Rome, Paris, Saint Petersburg or New York, inhabited by the ghostly presences of admired artists and writers.

Hand in hand with Proust, Freud, Cavafis, Pessoa, Rohmer, Sebald and many more, the author explores unreal time: that of the man who could have been and was not, everything that could have happened and did not happen, but still could happen and is in a limbo between fantasy and reality. Some memoirs in the form of essays in which the author of Far from Egypt and Call me by your name confronts the past and the present, longing and desire, in an attempt to understand the nostalgic vein that hovers over his person and about almost all his work.

Homo unrealis
5/5 - (8 votes)

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