Room on the Sea: Three Novellas
by André Aciman
Thanks to the phenomenal success of Call Me By Your Name, André Aciman can be considered one of the best-known contemporary writers of “literary romance”. Room on the Sea is a volume which brings together three novellas, each of which explores a different facet of love: A Gentleman from Peru, Mariana and the title story, Room on the Sea.
I had read (and reviewed) A Gentleman from Peru some months back and had found it, on the whole, underwhelming. Its premise is a promising one, combining elements of a romance between an older man and a younger woman, with a dose of magical realism or speculative fiction. However, I thought that the story did not achieve its full potential. I’m happy to report that in this volume, it works better, because it provides an interesting contrast to the other two featured stories. For instance, Room on the Sea eschews the magical realism in favour of a very “factual” of a budding affair between a man and a woman in their 60s. They meet on a jury pool, and soon find a rapport which has gone missing in their relationship with their respective spouses. The story starts almost banally, and the dialogue is often cringy – perhaps precisely because it feels so authentic, often consisting of self-conscious conversation between two relatively elderly people having the type of crush more typical of the teens and twenties. Beyond the sketchy plot, Room on the Sea is an often thoughtful story about relationships in old age.
In my view, however, the most striking item from a literary perspective is the final novella, Mariana, which as Aciman explains in an afterword, is a reworking of a 17th Century pseudo-authentic epistolary novel: The Portuguese Letters. The original, generally attributed to Gabriel-Joseph de Lavergne, comte de Guilleragues (1628-1684), consists of the confession of a young Portuguese nun, who is seduced and then abandoned by a French officer. Aciman transposes the story into a contemporary tale of an American graduate in her early twenties who is spending time in an academy in Italy while (in a meta-literary twist) working on a manuscript about a novel published in 1669. Aciman’s Mariana falls for an artist staying at the same academy who, quite soon afterwards, replaces her with his latest flame. It is a story about obsessive love, and makes for a striking psychological study.
While I have reservations about the individual novellas, they work well together, adding up to more than the sum of their respective parts.
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