This is my first book by Aciman and it won’t be my last. I missed out on reading Call Me By Your Name which everyone I know who has read it lauds it for prose, location, and subject matter.
I’ll be honest, what pulled me to The Gentleman From Peru was the cover of the book; I’m a magpie for a good and cute book cover that immediately transports you somewhere outside of your reality. And this took me to the Amalfi Coast right away; I could taste the Amalfi lemons just looking at the cover; it literally titillated my palette so much so, I wanted to be there and this book took me there.
This is a short story of a life and love, past loves in present lives at different tangents in their journey back to each other. It will not be for some time yet.
Five friends, on holiday, find themselves stuck on the Amalfi Coast thanks to boat trouble; they hunker down in a hotel until the boat is fixed, and are immediately fascinated by a gentleman staying at the hotel who dines on his own every day. One day they invite him to join them, and things take a turn for the surreal. He would then go on to tell them about their lives and loves, certain things that are known only to them, maybe even only to their parents, he even saves one of them from losing a tonne of money on the stock market. There is one friend, there is always that one friend in the group who has an aversion to everything, that has an aversion to the Gentleman from Peru. She doesn’t care for anything he has to say because it is just a little too woowoo. She would go so far as to take jabs at him about his gift but wouldn’t you know it, they have history. One afternoon, the Gentleman from Peru invites her to lunch and over the course of an afternoon they get to know each other better and he takes her to visit a house that is immediately familiar to her, she swears she has been there before, only she cannot remember ever being there in her lifetime. And yet the memories remain, the scents are true and the prickling on the back of her neck tell a different story than her reality wants her to hold on to.
This is a love story that unravels in the most heart tugging of ways; it not only brings a place alive so vividly but it sears the love story of lonely hearts that belong together at different tangents of their lives, into our imaginations. One knows more than the other, knows precisely when they will find their way back, but it is not in our time with them. It is almost heartbreaking yet heartwarming at the same time.
Aciman packs this story with such a rich and fulfilling narrative, it gets its hooks into the reader; it is yearning for more, on the edge of your sit you hang onto his every word. You turn the last page hoping to find an epilogue that takes us back to them, to find out what happens next because we cannot leave them, and they will never leave us. It is a compact and impactful love story that weaves a tale of life and love, a pull of two people and the push that tugs them apart from each other. He waits a lifetime to hear one word because it takes him back to the night when his whole world shatters, but it is balm for his soul. Good God are we broken and fixed all at once with that word.
A beautiful story, a richly divine romance in place and time and space. Read it of an afternoon.