Uneven meditations on aging, regret, and loss.
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.Pub Date: June 24, 2025
ISBN: 9780374613419
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2025
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
I Who Have Never Known Men ($22.00; May 1997; 224 pp.; 1-888363-43-6): In this futuristic fantasy (which is immediately reminiscent of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale), the nameless narrator passes from her adolescent captivity among women who are kept in underground cages following some unspecified global catastrophe, to a life as, apparently, the last woman on earth. The material is stretched thin, but Harpman's eye for detail and command of tone (effectively translated from the French original) give powerful credibility to her portrayal of a human tabula rasa gradually acquiring a fragmentary comprehension of the phenomena of life and loving, and a moving plangency to her muted cri de coeur (``I am the sterile offspring of a race about which I know nothing, not even whether it has become extinct'').
Pub Date: May 1, 1997
ISBN: 1-888363-43-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
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