Alibis

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.