Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
This exquisite triptych from Aciman (Call Me By Your Name) explores desire and fate among old friends, new acquaintances, and heartbroken lovers. In "The Gentleman from Peru," a group of young Americans visit Italy's Amalfi Coast, where they become transfixed by a solitary 60-something guest at their hotel. Over drinks, the older man, whose name is Raúl, entertains the Americans with his psychic abilities, correctly guessing their birth months and revealing a secret unrequited love between two of them. The elegiac title entry chronicles a week in the lives of two elderly New Yorkers who meet during jury duty. Catherine, a psychologist, and Paul, an attorney, are both unhappily married, a fact they confess to one another as the story builds to a surprising leap of faith. "Mariana" concludes the collection with the somber interior monologue of a scorned woman who struggles to reassess her self-worth and salvage her life without the security of her ex-lover's attention. Throughout, Aciman eloquently explores the life-changing impact of love, explicated in a dazzling soliloquy from Raúl on the ever-present prospect of a connection with a stranger ("That person could just as easily be us in another body. And the beauty of it is that they feel it just as much as we do.... Us in others, isn't this the definition of love?"). It's a triumph. Agent: Lynn Nesbit, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc. (June)
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Review by Library Journal Review
Bestselling Aciman (Call Me by Your Name) returns with a collection of three novellas that explore longing. In "A Gentleman from Peru," a dapper gentleman sits alone at a resort in southern Italy, observing a group of young Americans. When the Americans become aware of his interest, they invite him to join them. He surprises them by first diagnosing and then healing the shoulder injury of one of the young people, then revealing secrets about each of them. He also believes that he has met one of them in a past life. Is he a faith healer, a mentalist, or a charlatan? "Mariana" is a tale of obsession about a woman whose life falls apart when her love affair with a colleague ends abruptly. Although she knows he is a liar and a cheat, she is willing to demean herself for any small part of his attention. In the collection's title story, while serving jury duty, two prospective jurors meet and form an immediate connection. VERDICT Count on Aciman for stories filled with love, lust, loss, and not a small measure of regret. These beguiling novellas offer up all of that in spades.--Barbara Love
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
In search of lost selves. In three somber novellas, Aciman reprises themes of longing and memory that have informed his previous memoirs and fiction. "The Gentleman From Peru" is Raúl, who befriends eight young Americans at a resort in southern Italy. A healer and prognosticator, he reveals intimate, unsettling details about their lives, and uncanny revelations about himself. All people, he claims, contain multitudes: a shadow-self, a bygone self, a self living elsewhere, a self that beckons to the future. Raúl singles out Margot, the most skeptical of the group, meeting her for lunches, swims, and walks, and taking her to the house where his family spent summers. As Raúl unfurls the mystery of his connection to Margot, though, what might have been a haunting tale is flawed by a convoluted web of coincidence. Similarly, in "Room on the Sea," a tender encounter between Paul, a retired lawyer, and Catherine, a soon-to-be-retired psychologist, is undermined by stilted interchanges. They meet in New York awaiting jury duty assignments, and over the course of lunches, coffees, walks on the High Line, and visits to art galleries, they confess frustration with their lives. Both in stale marriages, they seem to be, as Paul puts it, "waiting for something unforeseen to come along." Catherine agrees: "What I find difficult these days," she admits, "is being who I am, who I want to be, who I could become." It's a difficulty shared by the febrile young narrator of "Mariana," enraged over having been abandoned after an intense, brief affair. She knew her lover was a womanizer, but he awakened in her a newly discovered passion that she does not want to let go. "It's me I miss," she writes to him, "the me I didn't know existed": a rapturous, ecstatic self. Uneven meditations on aging, regret, and loss. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
