Editorial

Losing Time with the Author of Call Me By Your name

Originally printed in Compass, March 18, 2021.

At the one-year anniversary of the start of the pandemic, we have become unwitting experts on the subjective nature of time. In joy, hours escape us, when waiting in expectation the second hand stands still, and when we have nowhere to go and nothing to do for a year, we reconsider what time means to us. When you think back on your year spent at home, you’ll remember not just what you did, but what you wanted to do instead, what you had missed and missed out on, and all you dreamed of doing once this ordeal met its end.

This blending of the emotional and temporal is central to the writing of André Aciman. The distinguished professor at the Graduate Center of City University of New York is the author of the memoir “Out of Egypt,” and is best known for his 2007 novel which inspired the 2017 Best Picture-nominee and Best Adapted Screenplay-winner “Call Me By Your Name,” as well as the novel’s 2019 sequel, “Find Me.”

In a joint online presentation on Wednesday, March 10, between House of Books in Kent, Conn., and Kent Memorial Library, historian and biographer David Nasaw joined Aciman to discuss his new collection of essays, “Homo Irrealis.” An ode to the transportive and tricky nature of time, Aciman takes on the irrealis mood, a minor grammatical expression that accounts for an event spoken of which has not yet, and may never, occur — and turns it into a condition of living. 

“Most of us spend… I don’t know what percentage of our time… thinking of the future, of what our fantasies are, our past fantasies, the ones we never realized in the past and that continue to reverberate on us,” Aciman said to Nasaw. “In other words, the things that we never did have acquired their own memory. So they haunt us just as much as the things that we did.”

Many will associate Aciman with the idle summer atmosphere of Italian director Luca Guadagnino’s adaptation of “Call Me By Your Name,” but crucial to the novel is the young narrator’s anxious relationship with what might be. His mind is a dance between his lusty daydreams of the future and the fear that time will run out before they are ever realized. As Aciman said of his fiction, in which most of the story’s “action” occurs within his characters’ longing, romantic minds, “There’s a very unsteady foothold in reality.” 

This willingness to escape the concrete is what makes Aciman such a tender observer of human desire — the excited fever and pangs of loss it can stir in us at once. “Homo Irrealis” recounts moments from across Aciman’s decades and travels, from Egypt to Rome to Manhattan movie theaters to see Éric Rohmer’s French films, but what happens in the darkened theater, or on a crowded bus as a teenager when he feels a stranger press against him, is so illusory it is almost incidental. 

What Aciman is keenly interested in is not recounting exact events, but our relationships with those lost yearnings, as well as the art that colors our perceptions. Writing on everything from Sigmund Freud to Julia Child to James Joyce’s “The Dead,” Aciman understands the way art reshapes our owns views of love, sex, growing older and even entire cities. 

As in one essay, as he described seeing the 1960 film “The Apartment”: “The film was about me. All great art invariably lets us say the same thing, ‘this was really about me.’ And this, in most cases, is not only a consolation, it’s an uplifting revelation that reminds us that we are not alone.”

Much of “Homo Irrealis” exists in the speculative, and Aciman is above all an observer of speculative desires. He writes of our hope to connect and the pieces of art that we borrow along the way to better chart the grammar of our own searching hearts. 

As he said to Nasaw, “You can never see Nice again, you see Matisse in Nice. You never see the cathedral in Rouen, you see the cathedral that Monet painted. You’re always seeing things through the artist. And of course you can never see Dublin in snow without thinking of Joyce.”

Personalized signed copies of “Homo Irrealis: Essays” are available through House of Books in Kent. For orders and more information go to www.houseofbooksct.com.