Roman year A memoir

A writer's emotional center of gravity and his authorial vision emerge in a wistfully remembered adolescent moment in Rome. Expelled from Egypt in the early 1960s, Aciman (Find Me, 2019) and his family arrive in Rome lost, destitute, and dependent upon the kindness of a complicated extended family. Eventually they settle at Via Clelia, a working-class neighborhood that "was ugly, dirty and at the approach of dusk seemed unbelievably sad." Life is hard. The language is new, his uncle Claude is harsh. Aciman must support his deaf mother while his father is away in Paris, trying to scrape together a future. It's possible that his family's apartment was recently a brothel. Contorted by the grief of exile and the pressures of a foreign city, adolescent André seeks solace in literature, visiting bookstores and parking himself on the Spanish Steps for a "long, lost rudderless afternoon." But eventually, he comes to revel in the sensations of his surroundings--the food (especially ice cream), the crowded buses, the history buried deep below. Italy even mediates his formative sexual experiences, including a tender fling with a much older neighbor. "This was Rome in the sixties," he writes, "teetering between affectations of modernity and the reluctance to yield to it."

In this richly layered account, Call Me by Your Name author Aciman recalls the loneliness and beauty of coming of age while his family was exiled in Rome. Against a backdrop of rising antisemitism in Egypt (covered in Aciman's previous memoir, Out of Egypt), the author's once-prosperous Jewish family fled from their Alexandria mansion in the mid-1960s with only the possessions they could fit in their suitcases. Teenage Aciman, his younger brother, and their deaf mother were installed in a shabby apartment owned by an ill-tempered uncle in a working-class Roman neighborhood: "I wanted the Rome of movies, of grand monuments, of beautiful women turning their heads to smile... but that Rome is nowhere in sight." While Aciman's parents argued about the family's future (his father wanted them to join him in Paris), Aciman retreated to his bedroom with classic literature. Then, after an unencumbered solo bike ride through the city, he gradually began to fall in love with his surroundings. In rapturous prose, Aciman captures the shocks of beauty he experienced ("Like music, it opened a universe of wonderful things, but I couldn't name a single one," he writes of smelling bergamot for the first time) during what amounted to a brief interlude on his way to the U.S. His poetic exploration of place and probing of what constitutes a home makes for exquisitely moving reading. Agent: Lynn Nesbit, Janklow & Nesbit. (Oct.)

The author ofCall Me by Your Name returns with a lush memoir of a turbulent time spent in Rome during his adolescence. When Aciman's family was expelled from Egypt, they were forced to abandon relative security for a life of emotional and financial strain in Italy. The author, his deaf mother, and his younger brother became refugees in the vast city of Rome, where he knew little Italian and even less about how to navigate their newfound poverty--a situation made worse by the tight-fisted financial control imposed by his uncle, a man described as "apistacchio chiuso, a closed pistachio, sealed, impregnable, impossible to pry open--i.e., constipated." Between his uncle's verbal reprimands and habit of keeping a close tally on every small expenditure allotted to them, the family had few recourses. Nearly always in the position of the interpreter between his mother and frequently cruel uncle, the young Aciman was thrust into heavy responsibility. As much as possible, he retreated into books, and his education led him to love Rome. In vibrant, emotive prose, Aciman immerses readers in that time and place. In addition to evocative yet uncompromising descriptions of their shoddy apartment off Via Appia Novia--"drab, ill-lit stores everywhere, and so much soot on buildings that time had discolored them. The grandeur of imperial Rome had no place here"--the author also captures the glory of late morning in Piazza di Spagna, where "there were colors everywhere, everything and everyone was beautiful." Aciman's recollections of a brief yet memorable period of his adolescence move forward with passion and intensity, rich with imagery and poignant memories. Ultimately, he creates an appealing combination of coming-of-age narrative and profound reflection on the concept of home. An absorbing exploration of the challenges and slivers of beauty that formed life as a refugee in Rome. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.