‘The Gentleman from Peru’: André Aciman’s novel mourns (or celebrates) lives spent in waiting

If the thought of romance strikes you with nostalgia alone, you are fairly well-positioned. But, if you sense the prying murmurs of a chance foregone or a door unshut, the position is plagued. That the characters in his novels get this positioning right is the result of André Aciman’s passionate insistence.

Moving on is not something Aciman’s characters are often successful with. In Call Me By Your Name (2007), his blockbuster debut novel, a 17-year-old Elio naturally infers that his six-week romance –though ardent and all-consuming by every measure – with an older house guest, Oliver, may not matter a few months ahead. Except, years after Oliver has returned to the States and even married someone else (a woman), the image of an unlived life still beckons to Elio like a “vision of fireflies on a summer field toward evening that keeps saying, you could have had this instead.”

For Aciman, setting things right was not a case of if but when. In the sequel that followed twelve years later, Find Me (2019), Oliver imagines confessing to his wife that he has long felt akin to “the severed tail of a lizard that flays and lashes about, while the body’s stayed behind all the way across the Atlantic” in Italy, where he had met Elio. Oliver’s life stopped when he left and resumes only when he finally returns after two decades.

The golden touch

In Aciman’s sixth and most recent novel, The Gentleman from Peru, the severed tail of the lizard has to persevere in not just one lifetime, but many. On Italy’s Amalfi Coast, a jolly group of eight college friends become curious about a fellow hotel guest, a stylish man somewhere in his sixties, who unfailingly sits across from their table in a corner every day, never uttering a word. This continues until, one day, the stranger walks up to their table and touches Mark, an otherwise spirited member of the group subdued by a shoulder injury, where he has been hurting. And like magic, the pain vanishes.

This finally gets the two parties talking and sets the reader off on a brisk ride through dialogue that will now blithely go on and on. Even a keen writer of marginalia is likely to keep turning the pages and forget all about the pencil sitting idle between their fingers.

The conversations move in many directions; left, right, back, forth – in time. The charming stranger, whose name, we learn, is Raúl, goes around the table revealing something about each one’s past or near future, all of which happens to be verifiably true. At one point, he stares at two people sitting together, Angelica and Paul, and announces that they have been in love with each other since college but neither has ever fully known or admitted it.

Later on, when Angelica is asked if the thought of possibly having married the wrong man bothers her, she says, “… what makes me sadder yet is that I may do nothing, despite Paul’s admission or mine. We may decide to lead the wrong life because we’ve gotten used to it.” Here, the novel begins to allude to the possibility that there are multiple lives one can live or could have lived – parallel universes, if you will – but it is not the case that each life is as good as another, because not all are right.

The consolation against grief

If Aciman’s earlier novels tell us that losing love is like the halting of life, The Gentleman from Peru ups the stakes to say that life, the right life, remains on hold even before love is actually found. Angelica and Paul have been leading the wrong life even without the realisation that they have been in love forever. In Call Me By Your Name, when Oliver meets Elio after being away for too long, he tells him, “Seeing you here is like waking from a twenty-year coma.” For Oliver, all his time apart from Elio has been close to the life of a dead man – numb, tragic, and contrary to life itself.

But in our fantastical novel, life in a coma stretches far beyond anything one can even try to conceive. When Raúl is forced to tell Margot – who is the one half of the novel’s grand romance – that her lives will be lives in waiting, she asks almost mournfully, “How many years, Raúl?” He refuses to answer. “How many? I don’t want to tell you,” but concedes soon. “Too many.” Margo begins to imagine her life, the way it has been and the way it will be hereafter, as pointless. Hers is a coma life whose end is excruciatingly far away:

“You make me fear the years of loneliness awaiting me. Or worse yet, that my life and eighteen generations of my life will mean nothing. What do I do with these lifetimes?”

Aciman’s prose is sapient and ambitious; it tries hard, sometimes overly and intrusively so, to move you – to inhabit a consciousness exceptionally deep and aware. Like waves tenaciously pulling at the sand, he needs to sweep you off your feet and take you along. But even if you resist, the risk of reading Aciman is that you are never on firm footing and are almost always swept away by the end.

Still, The Gentleman from Peru is not a melancholic book. Hope is infernally distant, yes, yet hope is. The tragedy is also the only consolation against itself. The coma will end, definitely – in a lifetime or two, three, four...

The Gentleman from Peru, André Aciman, Faber and Faber.