André Aciman – “Time is not always our friend”

The Gentleman from Peru is a fascinating love story spread across multiple lifetimes. In India, most readers are familiar with the concept of rebirth; it is introduced through religion. How do readers in the United States engage with it? Is there greater openness to it among people who have been raised to think we live only once?

Most people do not believe in reincarnation or metempsychosis. But scratch the surface a tiny bit and you will find that the concept of a previous lifetime is far too embedded in our minds. We do not want to accept it, but it informs so many of our most private moments. In many respects, it explains why we are so easily drawn to magical realism.

When and how did you first encounter the idea of past lives, and what did you make of it? How has it affected your understanding of time, as a human being and a novelist?

I have always been intrigued by the notion of a past life. I frequently write about shadow selves and shadow identities and unfinished lives waiting to be lived. The concept of past lives is not foreign to me. Time, as I have often said, is not always our friend and we seldom ever understand its operations. Every time a mortal tries to think of time, he finds himself hampered because he lacks the tools to fathom its tricky mechanisms. Most times when trying to think of time, we end up thinking of death, and we do not know how to think of death either, since we believe we will die but are not quite convinced that we actually will.

What made you write Raúl as someone who is “originally from Peru”? What kind of associations related to Peru were you hoping to evoke? Does it represent a place that is mysterious and exotic to the Americans in the novel who run into Raúl in Italy?

Raúl first appeared in my novel Enigma Variations. But his appearance was brief and I knew that he was destined to have his own tale. I wanted Raúl to be doubly displaced, so I relegated him to a very far out spot. The inspiration came to me from Ivan Bunin’s tale The Gentleman from San Francisco. But to be perfectly frank, there is no reason that he should be from Peru.

Raúl’s conversation with the Americans about shadow-selves, bygone selves, and selves waiting in the wings seems like an extension of your book Homo Irrealis, which explores the relationship between the real and imagined. Were you working on the books simultaneously? What was it like to explore the same theme in fiction and non-fiction?

This is an excellent point. The subject of the irrealis mood has been on my mind for several years. It is about the conditional mood in language, as well as the subjunctive mood — what are also known as counterfactual moods. Time dimensions that do not take place. These shadow-identities and hinter-identities do not really, really exist, but we know we are inhabited by multiple identities that frequently appear in our dreams. We are plural — or as Satan tells Jesus, we are legion! We would like to think we have one self, but in reality we have many, many selves.

Why did the Amalfi Coast in Italy seem like the ideal setting for Raúl to meet Margot?

To put it very simply, I love the Italian coast, and Amalfi above all others. I have no idea why I selected that coast, but to write about it is to place myself there, and since I know one fabulous hotel in Positano, writing about that spot was another way to be visit and get my toes wet with the sea there.

The relationship between Raúl and Margot made me think of the relationship between Oliver and Elio in your novel Call Me by Your Name. How do you manage to write intergenerational love stories in a way that does not come across as creepy especially in a post-MeToo world? Why does an age gap between lovers make people uncomfortable?

I think it is understandable that an age gap makes people uncomfortable, especially if relations between individuals are not consensual or devious. But as a writer I have never been interested in devious or non-consensual relationships.

Margot’s friend Mark does not believe in the supernatural. He cannot stand “the air of uplifted piety on those who speak of auras and astral houses”. What is the reason behind this resistance? Is he afraid of things that cannot be explained by science?

If anything, it is Margot who resists any instance of the supernatural. In essence, all Westerners are resistant to the supernatural; but as I have said above, all you need to do is scratch the surface and you have immediate believers. The supernatural is only banished because it makes us uncomfortable, because we lack the terms to accept it and we do not have words for it. But all you have to do is hold a pendulum on a string to recognise why your neck hurts, and we are instant supernaturalists!

As a novelist, how do you feel when people try hard to dig into your personal life to figure out which incidents in your fiction are semi-autobiographical?

People are welcome to explore my “nether” self. I like to be as candid as possible. The problem is that people frequently confuse me the author with me the man. We are not always the same, even if we exchange notes and have very frequent encounters and friendly relations. But my privacy is also important.

The novel refers to Homer and Virgil, and sneaks in a joke about American liberal arts students whose education costs their parents “a fortune” though they read only “bits and pieces”, so they know nothing about the distant past outside of “college Greek 101”. As a professor of literature, how do you cope with this disconnect that students feel? How do you make room for them to expand their idea and experience of time?

Most people try to bring the ancients to their students by drawing all manner of “familiarizing” vehicles. They make the ancients similar to moderns, which is why, for instance, so many people try to dress down Shakespeare by giving his characters modern garb. Ancient characters are indeed no different from modern individuals, which is why I always tell my students that my favourite book of all time is The Peloponnesian War by Thucydides. His characters are no different from our own. But it is imperative to see them also as people of their times and not to erase the difference of 2000+ years. The ancients may have been very superstitious and, though they may have had identical psyches as our own, they may have nursed completely different if opposite values from our own. To want to see similarities and not appreciate the differences is to totally misread the classics.

Chintan Girish Modi is a freelance writer, journalist and book reviewer.