Alibis: Essays on Elsewhere

The essays on Rome, Paris and Barcelona are very interesting and I especially enjoyed his rich descriptions of places. Having just read "Call Me By Your Name" I was definitely in the mood for more of this writer's voice however, some of his thought process, his struggles with his own detachment from the present moment and the detailing of that particular angle became tedious. Some of these essays were in the form of a memoir after all and he does call into question the authenticity of any writer's memoir but at the same time, the mind twist just got on my nerves. OK Andre or Andrew or whoever you really are I get it but the idea was over labored somehow. Perhaps this longing to grasp or longing to be totally engaged is substance of the wonderful passionate longing in "Call Me By Your Name" but here it just felt tiresome.

I love everything Andre Aciman writes, but his essays have a particular place in my heart. They are so poetic and touch on complex feelings both unique to his experience and within accessible reach of every reader.

Purchased for the Place des Vosges piece in this volume, an article from long ago that I never forgot all these years. Lovely book.

Alibis is a book of assays and mostly it will be interesting for people who read and like Out Of Egypt. The assays added nice and very interesting details about author live in Alexandria. Also it tells about the process of writing the memoir.The book has interesting assays about traveling. I really enjoyed reading it not in small part because the author is wonderful stylist.

Anciman is inspiring. Always. Pure reading bliss.

I am an admirer of Andre Aciman and this collection of essays is no exception, in fact I am using it in my current Personal Essay class. His writing is clear and sensitive. I recommend "False Papers" to those readers who have enjoyed "Alibis".

This is an example of superb intelligent writing all too rare these days. Bravo, Andre, for another job well done!

This book is one of those writings that make you think about life, your place in it, and what that means. As you read the author's stories, you experience a place with a new, keener set of senses, whether or not you have ever physically traveled there. It is as with the mind's eye, you "pack a bag and go." The stories can be read in any order. I was moved to tears when reading the first called "Lavender" and felt homesick when reading "New York, Luminous." The Afterword commentary at the end of the book offers much food for thought, and should not be skipped.

All stories start with a place and time and then the thoughts are allowed to wander around. Great descriptions, beautiful ideas. I want to go, see and think of your own.

André Aciman could be seen as a masochistic writer. He constantly revisits scenes of distress and delight in order to spark his writing. In Alibis, his latest collection of essays, he confronts this central springboard of his work.I write about exile, remembrance, and the passage of time. I write - so it would seem - to recapture, to preserve and return to the past, though I might just as easily be writing to forget and put that past behind me.Throughout his recollections, Aciman weaves prose poems of great truth. The cities that drift across his vision are more alive on the page than the places themselves. So Aciman cannot help but weave his own delicious defeat. They are a film, he says, a version which cannot possibly be true. Alibis is filled with these precious moments, always just out of reach.For those who have read Aciman's novels - the heartstruck Call Me By Your Name and the cooler Eight White Nights - the themes in Alibis will be familiar. Memory, desire, the spirit of a place. Yet here Aciman strikes on something new: before, he appeared as a rather anonymous psychogeographer; now, he casts himself as the writer, alive to self-criticism and interrogation. The rhetorical nature of his writing therefore finds new levels of jeopardy.Aciman is at his strongest when the place he visits indicates the person he is. His writing about Rome is particularly redolent of the need to 'preserve and return to the past'. Having been exiled in the Italian capital as a boy, it retains a particular hold on the adult. Constantly shifting perspective away from the familiar, Aciman finds meaning in its otherwise meaningless rhythms. The real city exists in the shadows.No less beautiful are his commentaries on Tuscany, Paris, Barcelona and Venice. But these more touristic pieces cannot match the no-holds-barred 'this is the writer and the person I have become' clarity of the other essays. Although Aciman berates the personal memoir era in which we live, his writing is most alive when it confronts itself. And having travelled from Alexandria, through Italy to New York, personal geography allows constant access to that poetry and pain. Groping his way to the point of departure, Aciman admits that 'there is no home'. But books such as Alibis are so redolent of the human condition that you're left hoping that its author will continue his search regardless. In doing so, André Aciman paints the permament impermanence of our world.