Roman Year: A Memoir

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.)