Q&A with André Aciman discussion

Looking forward to seeing everyone's comments. Feel free to add your thoughts on Eight White Nights and I'll jump in starting February 22nd.

Thanks!

"Prince Oskar" seems very lost and without identity. How did you come about NOT giving him a name, but allowing Clara this honor?

What's in a name?

The easy answer would be to say that since my novel is entirely written from the narrator’s perspective, he doesn’t need to say his name; he knows his name. We’re in his mind. We think what he thinks, we know what he knows. How many times do I think of my name when I think about myself? Never.

Besides, giving him a name would be making a concession to the (very, very dated!) conventions of the novel—and this novel clearly doesn’t intend to.

For the same reason, the narrator’s profession (if he has one) is never mentioned. It’s an irrelevant detail. I’m interested in what he thinks and how he thinks—not in reality checks. I’m not interested in the world around him, because he himself is not interested in the world around him. This isn’t journalism. I don’t even want to judge him for not being interested in the world around him.

Ideally, Eight White Nights asks a very difficult yet utterly simple question: who would I be if you take away my name, my profession, my origins, my religion, my address. What is left of me, what makes me me without these external factoids and inherited props? The narrator has no name, no profession, his origins are fuzzy, his religion (Jewish, yes, but he is a “runcible” Jew), and his culture is all over the place. Eight White Nights is not interested in easily verifiable details.

Clara gets a name, but then no sooner does the narrator hear her name than he instantly begins to deconstruct it—as though he couldn’t quite believe that “Clara” was all there was to it, as if her name had a hidden “meaning” and hinted at other, more elusive secrets—ultimately because everything in this novel means so much more than appearances suggest; nothing is ever on “neutral,” because no mind, no psyche is ever at rest. We’d be dead otherwise.

As Matisse did with linocut portraits, I barely describe Clara. Just the vaguest of outlines. A chin, a piece of jewelry, a shirt. A character is not a collection of traits and antics; a character doesn’t need to have a job, or a past; a character is energy. A character is attracted by another character’s energy—or repelled by it, or left indifferent. One doesn’t even judge an energy; one can’t.

“Printz” has a nickname, because in Clara’s hands he is totally malleable, shiftless, lost. To love someone is to suspect that he/she is stronger than we are, maybe even better than we are. If we are shy with someone at first it is precisely because we suspect that we are operating from weakness, that we are not good enough. There is no parity in love.

Love may be a metaphor for many things—and the narrator does say that love might be just that—but in love we are essentially asking the Other to give us a new name, a new identity, or, in Dante’s words, a vita nuova, new life. Make me better than who I am. Help me like who I am. Make my dream self come true. Help me reinvent myself. Tell me who I really, really am and want to be.

We grope in the dark, and words seldom help. Clara fares no better. She is constantly renaming things around her because this is how she tries to get a grip on the world around her: by giving everything an amused nickname, by turning everything that scares her into a harmless inside joke.

Mr. Aciman,

Would you mind sharing some bits about your personal writing processes? How do your characters evolve, do you stick with a specific time to write, do you use a page quota, etc?

I absolutely loved "Call me by Your name" so I look forward to reading "Eight White Nights."

Johnos

How I write

My characters don’t really evolve. They come—as one says of a rental—“as is.” They don’t change as I’m writing, they don’t grow, they don’t even grow on me. At most, the narrator’s perception of them changes. My characters are usually born from a sentence or from a sentence fragment that seems to capture their voice, their identity. Call Me by Your Name opens with Oliver’s lapidary “Later!” No sooner does the narrator overhear him saying this than he intuits the kind of person Oliver must surely be. Elio is instantly attracted, threatened, mystified. No surprises! Oliver may or may not respond, may turn out to be a lover or not, but “Later!” encapsulates all of Oliver’s energy. The same can be said about Out of Egypt, which opens with Uncle Vili’s shibboleth: “Are we or aren’t we?” That little question captures the strutting, daredevil braggart that Vili is. He’ll never change. In Eight White Nights the confidence with which Clara tells a complete stranger “I am Clara” already suggests everything we need to know about her. These three characters are the exact antithesis of the narrator: he is shy, they are bold; he is tentative, they rush into things. These little fragments of speech are like the genetic template from which the entire character will be drawn; their personality is already embedded in their opening words, their salvo.

I never have a plan regarding the evolution of a character. In fact, all that happens with my characters is that, while they stay “as is,” their personality is constantly being reevaluated, reinterpreted etc. They are always “X”; it is just the narrator who supposes that they might perhaps be “non-X” or “Y” or “not-quite-Y” but “not quite non-X” either. And so they move along as in Wagner’s Tristan or Parsifal. The music is constantly being subjected to minor alterations, but the key “genetic” phrase is instantly recognizable.

I do not have a schedule. I normally steal time to write. Nothing makes me happier than when I wake up at 6 and have my coffee ready by 6:20 and sit at my desk in the glorious morning sunlight, with the feeling that I have hours and hours ahead of me with nothing to hold my attention but writing. This is a luxury. Going to a colony, as I’ve done at Yaddo, is heaven. No internet to speak of, no phones, no errands, no interruptions. just me and my writing. Hours and hours of being with myself and the world I’ve invented. But how often does this happen?

I have no quota. Once I’ve written my paragraph and feel that I’ve firmed it up, I am happy. Usually I rewrite a sentences about 30 times.

In writing, a lot depends on happenstance. Happenstance is not an incidental fact; it is essential; the creative process cannot occur unless unforeseen events are constantly occurring—barging in. Seizing what comes adventitiously is essential. A “lead” seldom comes to you because you planted it; you don’t even know it’s a lead until you’ve stumbled on it. But to let it go because it wasn’t part of the plan is criminal.

A writer does not “clock in” and “clock out.” I’ve never believed that one “punches” in when it comes to writing. Exhaustion or obligations make me stop. A writer doesn’t “produce” X number of words per day, per hour. There is no production log, no time sheet in writing. If there were, then think what kind of writing it would probably be: not soul-searching; certainly not deep; more like journalism. Call it assembly-line writing, with a lunch and coffee break thrown in. It may be decent prose, but it’s never going to be art.

The ideal thing for a writer is when he has written all day—with minor interruptions thrown in—but needs to head out to a dinner party. He doesn’t want to lose his momentum, but he is also eager to meet friends at the dinner. Half-way through dinner, though, he can’t wait to get back. Yes, he loves his friends, and company is always fun, but how utterly fantastic to get back before midnight, change clothes, and pick up exactly where he left off at seven. If he’s lucky, he may stay up till two in the morning. Something someone said that evening caught his attention. He made a point of remembering it. He’ll use it in a sentence he had written earlier that day.

Ooooops I inadvertently deleted two questions. Could you please restate them???? Thanks

Someone asked: Do you think there is a connection between gay desire and your prose style? I had that sense while I was reading your novel.

You ask a very difficult question. You could be asking whether gay desire speaks in a recognizably gay style. In the same vein, you might be asking whether a gay sensibility exists, and whether that sensibility has a particular inflection, a way of unfolding a narrative, of negotiating the real world, of examining the inner life, of speaking about body and desire. Is there a style that is, regardless of its content, gay?

But you might also be asking a far, far broader question, i.e. does style—which is nothing more than an arrangement of words and clauses—and its attendant, cadence, underscore the mood, the attitude, the emotional tensions and desires found in the narrative itself—say in a novel like Call Me by Your Name? And if so, how does it underscore them? Does style convey what would otherwise be too elusive for words? Think of the fusion of cadence and tale in the last four pages of James Joyce’s “The Dead.” Style, in this case, is more than an economy of words and clauses; it is a metaphysics of words and clauses. Without the style, the story is nothing.

But to come back to your question. Since my style tends to be very meditative, and since I wrote a gay novel, does this mean that a meditative style is gay? I have written Eight White Nights in a style that is just as meditative and just as uncertain of everything around and within us—but Eight White Nights is not a gay novel, or, to be more accurate, it is not about gay love.

Or, to put it otherwise, one could allege that a style that speaks uncertainty about everything and that is meditative suggests a sexuality that is itself tentative—and Eight White Nights is very much about this. Does this make it a gay novel? Or is “tentativeness” inherent to sexuality, regardless of sexual orientation?

Of course one could make all kinds of trivial generalities: Ernest Hemingway is allegedly macho, Jane Austen is not. Hemingway writes in short, spitfire sentences (masculine); Austen loves to subordinate her sentences (feminine). So does Henry James. This reminds me of a test that was conducted on the radio once. The radio announcer took a piano Fantasy by Brahms performed by three renowned world pianists and asked the public to phone in and identify who of the three pianists was male and who was female. Naturally, every conceivable cliché about masculine and feminine playing was exploded. By the same token, is there a gay style in piano playing? I don’t think so.

So let me throw back the question to you: what was it about my style that suggested a gay sensibility? There must be something you picked up in Eight White Nights, some hunch that alerted you to something, however subliminal. What occasioned the hunch? What unnamed aspect of voice and attitude triggered the recognition?

Or was it something else—not style, not voice, not attitude but cadence? What does cadence tell us? What does it say that words don’t tell?

Mr. Aciman, Do you agree with Jennifer Egan's assessment that Eight White Nights is an homage to Proust? Would you comment on your sense of how much Proust's work may intentionally or otherwise, inform your work? Thank you.

Proust and André

People always invoke Proust when they write about me. Since I write about memory, and about the passage of time, and about thwarted love and worlds lost, readers and reviewers can’t resist bringing up Proust—all the more so because my sentence are long and attempt to capture states of being that most writers find too elusive, too fussy. All very Proustian. But my book is not Proustian. Just because a narrator is profoundly introspective or because he finds it impossible to know or trust others, or because an author happens to have a French name, all these do not make a Proustian. Similarly, just because a desired woman happens to be “difficult” does not automatically make her an Odette de Crécy. Reviewers seldom think beyond the obvious; some are not sophisticated, and some simply don’t know enough.

Many people have mentioned Eric Rohmer and Dostoevsky, because the names of both recur in my novel. But few see that Eight White Nights is really a tribute to none other than James Joyce, the greatest writer of English prose since the publication of the King James Bible. Nor do they see that my novel is not just about love—in the sense that Provencal poetry was never just about love. Eight White Nights is also about the search for poetry through love, or about the possibility (or the illusion) of finding beauty and meaning in otherwise ordinary, damaged lives. It is only when one sees this that, yes, one can begin to speak about Proust.

As the narrator says on looking out to the Hudson, “Life on the other bank. Life as it’s meant to be, not as we end up living it. Bellagio, not New Jersey. Byzantium.”

Proust taught me many things, but the best is this: that however elegiac one is, one must always temper elegy. Proust would have remained a very gifted but middling writer had he remained lyrical; it was when he discovered that lyricism can be laced with irony that he became a genius.

Reviewers frequently compare me to Proust and find me… wanting. It would be like taking a twentieth-century poet and comparing him to Shakespeare. What’s the point?

Reviewers!

Hello, Mr. Aciman,

I've just discovered the book/movie "Call me by your name". The title made me read the book, since it reminded me of another similar story. I was deeply touched by your book, because I had almost the same experience as Elio had that summer. You offered more details about him, since he was the narrator, especially in the first three parts, and in the fourth we know more details about Oliver's life. I would have liked to read a chapter written from Oliver's point of view, to have a complete image of their love. Was it your intention to present Oliver only through his answers and hints?