Her gesture then was as gracious as everything about her. Choose her well, she’d said. What words. I wanted someone exactly like her, just twenty years younger, which was how old she was when she stayed at my great-grandmother’s in Egypt after escaping Germany, when all the men in the house, having watched her play the piano in the living room, swore they’d lost their minds over her…She loved me and I loved her. Choose her well. No one would have said it in just that way, or found words so spare and quick to help dodge the heartrending elegy in her voice. She was the only person with whom I could discuss ideas—not academically, which is how so many professors pour notions into our heads, but ideas with a completely human dimension, which is what ideas are in the end, not lifeless slugs devoid of human features, but sentient figures of what we live with when we can’t even tell a feeling from a thought and can only sketch what is bound to miss the mark. Look for the human, she would say when she wasn’t asking me to think American—even if there’s no proof you’re right, look for the human. What a pleasure to spell out my thoughts with her, when she’d ask what did I think such-and-such an author was really, really thinking when he wrote that piece? Then, turning to music, she’d say, This was what Beethoven struggled with when composing this sonata. “Do I know this for sure?” she’d ask. “No. Do I have any proof? No. But am I right? Absolutely.” […]
As it turned out, Look for the human was what I never forgot. I passed it on to those who listened. It was, however, almost impossible for others to practice, having never met Flora.
— André Aciman, Roman Year: A Memoir (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, October 22, 2024)
Notes:
- DK Recommendation? Loved it!
- Book Reviews
- NY Times: “Roman Year“: An Exile Revisits the Squalor and Grandeur of 1960s Italy
- “Aciman evokes the passing of time in rich, meandering prose, rebuilding 1960s Rome in sentences suffused with light and sound and memories — the taste of an artichoke, the smell of bergamot and of Crêpe de Chine perfume. From the bewilderment of arrival, the young Aciman moves through denial toward a gradual acceptance of his new life. “Roman Year” is both an affecting coming-of-age story and a timely, distinctive description of the haunted lives of refugees.”
- Guardian: Memento Amore
- NY Times: “Roman Year“: An Exile Revisits the Squalor and Grandeur of 1960s Italy