André Aciman writes a novel of himself

'I cannot write unless I pretend to remember,' says the author of 'False Papers'

André Aciman explores his life in terms of exile, nostalgia and loss in "False Papers," a collection of autobiographical writings that hover between novel and essay

In this story: In the key of loss Titillation without ramification RELATED SITES

By David Holzel
Special to CNN.com

(CNN) -- It might come as a surprise to learn that André Aciman despises the memoir vogue. His first book, "Out of Egypt" (1994), was a memoir. And in his just published "False Papers -- Essays on Exile and Memory" (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), Aciman revisits his childhood in Alexandria, Egypt, and his subsequent years in Rome, Paris and New York.

Better to think of "False Papers" as a novel of himself.

"I've always wanted to be a novelist, so I approach (the memoir) with impatience and impertinence," Aciman says in a telephone interview. "But I cannot write unless I pretend to remember."

And so he remembers -- or pretends to -- the train ride from Rome to Paris, unremarkable except for a 20-minute stretch when he could view the sea. And the Square Lamartine in Paris where, while fetching water for his grandmother, he felt his first stirrings of adolescent adventure. And his exploration of the abandoned 91st Street subway station of the Broadway Local.

"The 'me' in these stories is totally faithful. 'Me' is what I write about," he says. "The question is, are the furnishings around me real or not? The events are real, but I've reconfigured things."

The actual experience, like all actual experiences, involved lots of down time. "It was enjoyable for me to fill in those empty spaces," he says.

"False Papers" is a collection of previously published pieces. Read together, they form an eerily interlocking whole. What connects them is Aciman's ongoing, rueful meditation on exile, loss and nostalgia.

"I cannot write if there is a sense of plenitude," he explains. "I have to hypothesize that there is a loss."

Aciman's loss of Alexandria -- "the capital of memory" as he calls it -- is ground zero for the feelings of nostalgia and loss that pervade his stories. Aciman and his family left Egypt in 1965 when he was 14. They were among the last Jews in Alexandria, the remnants of a 2,000-year-old community forced out by Gamal Abdel Nasser's nationalist regime. The family then lived in Rome and Paris before Aciman came to the United States, where he studied at Harvard.

"An exile reads change the way he reads time, memory, self, love, fear, beauty: in the key of loss," Aciman writes in the essay "Shadow Cities," which begins with what he perceives to be the demolition of Strauss Park, a small, grubby green space in his neighborhood on New York's Upper West Side. "Even if I don't disappear from a place, places disappear from me."

Not that he necessarily wants the beaches of Alexandria back, or the disappeared lovers or his boyhood adventures in Paris. Paradoxically, despite his longing for what he has lost, Aciman -- the Aciman participating in the interview, at any rate -- is happy where he is.

"I don't have to have loved it to write about it. I just have to have lost it." He speaks gently, his voice carrying a vestigial trace of his polyglot background. In Alexandria, his Europeanized family spoke French, English and Ladino, the language of Sephardi Jews.

In exile, he writes, "only paradox makes sense."

Taken together, "False Papers" is "basically a Jewish tale told in a non-Jewish way," he explains. "It's a story of loss. Of wanting to be home and with the people you can't be with. And once you are with the people you want to be with, you still aren't happy. It's always the reversal of the previous situation, and you never come home."

From this sense of loss also bubble thoughts on literature, film, poetry and art. Aciman, who teaches literature at Bard College in upstate New York, finds in "incidental patches of blue" seen through French windows in the paintings of Henri Matisse, "the nonchalance with which I ... ignore the sea, that (makes) the sea come alive for me today."

The literary figure who looms largest in "False Papers" is Marcel Proust, who, Aciman writes, "perfected a language ... and a vision that gave memory an introspection and aesthetic scope and magnitude no author had conferred on either before. He allowed intimacy itself to become an art form."

Very different from the current fad for memoir, which Aciman says he hates, because it has no ramifications beyond mere titillation.

"It's just confession without introspection. I want somebody to study himself in a profound way, and at the same time be aware that he's involved in a literary act."

Aciman's self-awareness is acute, and is reflected in the book's title. In addition to the allusion to refugees who make their transit bearing false papers, the phrase connotes the writer's own hybrid style, neither novel nor essay. "I don't feel comfortable in either style," he says, "and so I feel false to both."

That sense of overwhelming ambivalence might be the best way to approach "False Papers."

Or maybe not.

'Inversions' (Aciman on Proust, from The New Republic)
'Diary' (from Slate)

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