Alibis: Essays on Elsewhere

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Alibis: Essays on Elsewhere (eBook) Pub. Date: 9/27/2011 Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
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Alibis: Essays on Elsewhere Pub. Date: 9/27/2011 Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

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Overview

A Boston Globe Best Nonfiction Book of 2011

Celebrated as one of the most poignant stylists of his generation, André Aciman has written a luminous series of linked essays about time, place, identity, and art that show him at his very finest. From beautiful and moving pieces about the memory evoked by the scent of lavender; to meditations on cities like Barcelona, Rome, Paris, and New York; to his sheer ability to unearth life secrets from an ordinary street corner, Alibis reminds the reader that Aciman is a master of the personal essay.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

This lambent collection of essays—many of which appeared in slightly altered form in literary magazines—by the author of the memoir Out of Egypt is a reminiscence. Bound by the Latin derivation of the title (meaning "elsewhere"), each essay is an exercise in nostalgia. In the hands of an artist like Aciman, nostalgia is not so much a self-indulgence as it is a revelation on the mysterious passage of time, on memory as the alchemical measure of truth. Aciman, a Jew of Alexandria whose native tongue is French, chronicles how he has never been able to feel at home, shamed by the uncertainties of youthful displacement and assimilation; his family's history of exile in Italy likewise feeds into Aciman's writing. The best pieces in this uneven collection rhapsodize on Cambridge, Mass., with its chemist-shop scent of lavender; on the timeless palimpsest of cultures that is the Eternal City; on life in Venice; on the tragic Jewish past of Barcelona; and the "derivative city"—New York—that is now home. These pieces drill into the brain. (Oct. 4)

Library Journal

Author of evocative fiction (Eight White Nights) and genre-defining memoir (Out of Egypt), Aciman offers linked essays regarding time, place, and memory—particularly the memory evoked by the smell of lavender; not for nothing is he editor of The Proust Project. Should be absorbing for smart readers; I'm anticipating.

More Reviews (2) Fewer Reviews

Kirkus Reviews

From the acclaimed Egyptian-born author, gorgeous musings on longing and memory fueled by travel.

A virtuoso in literary criticism, memoir and fiction (Eight White Nights, 2010, etc.), Aciman revisits themes that have obsessed him since his youth growing up in Alexandria, when he and his family were waiting for years for visas to migrate to Europe, then the United States. Anticipation—and all the longing it held—proved the ideal, romantic, satisfying state, rather than the actual delivery. For example, longing for America all those years proved much more delicious and lasting than the actual naked reality of living there. In each essay, Aciman elegantly palpates these themes of place and displacement ("dispersion, evasion, ambivalence"). In "Lavender," the myriad scents of aftershave he will discover over the years mark milestones in his life, but hark back essentially to the first, significant scent of his father's lavender aftershave. Initiating his young sons into the memories of his youth, in "Intimacy," involves taking them back to Via Clelia in Rome, where the author 40 years before lived in limbo with his family for three years while waiting for their visas to America. For Aciman, who was poor, speaking Italian self-consciously with a foreign accent, it was a time of shame, yet writing about it helps unlock the "numbness" and encourages "dream-making." In "Temporizing," through the personal exploration of his family's Marrano roots, the author fashions a brilliantly subtle excursus on the craft of a writer such as Proust, who avoids the tyranny of the particular, the day-to-day, by circumventing pain and sorrow at all costs, and passing all experience through "the literary time filter." Aciman's own travel essays—on Venice, the Place des Vosges, Tuscany, Barcelona and New York—filter the present through an ever-shifting palette of sensuous memory and impression.

These essays sing with bracing clarity.

Teju Cole

…[a] beautiful new book of essays…Most of its chapters are travel essays, and Aciman is a spirited guide, sensitive to history but alive also to food, sunshine, art and aimless wandering. The pleasure of reading him resides in the pleasure of his company. He knows a lot, and often gets carried away, but he also knows how to doubt himself. If his destinations seem conventional…his engagement with them is idiosyncratic…Aciman's deep fidelity to the world of the senses, and to the translation of those sensations into prose, makes Alibis a delight.
—The New York Times Book Review

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780374102753
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date: 9/27/2011
Pages: 208
Sales rank: 256,300
Product dimensions: 5.80 (w) x 8.20 (h) x 0.80 (d)

Meet the Author

Andre Aciman

André Aciman is the author of Eight White Nights, Call Me by Your Name, Out of Egypt, and False Papers, and is the editor of The Proust Project (all published by FSG). He teaches comparative literature at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He lives with his wife and family in Manhattan.

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