“A different animal” – My Roman Year by André Aciman
Anyone who has experienced having to leave the place where they were born due to war, persecution or because a parent’s job takes them elsewhere, will know the surge of difficult emotions one has to deal with. My Roman Year is the story of the period Aciman spent in Rome as a boy when his Jewish family was expelled from Egypt following the Six-Day War (5 to 10 June 1967), part of the Arab–Israeli conflict that began in May 1948 and is ongoing to this day.
Considered to be well-off in Alexandria, everything changes once the family arrives in Rome. Any romantic notions about Italy’s capital which Aciman may have held are quickly quashed when the author, his younger brother, and his deaf mother move into a rented apartment, secured by his eccentric Uncle Claude, which turns out to be a recently vacated brothel in an undesirable part of the city.
Aciman’s father, a charismatic, intellectual and womaniser has relocated to Paris on his own. His mother believes it’s for the best, but for the young brothers, particularly for André, it is harder. He says:
“There were just the three of us in the world. There was no one else. We needed to stick together. We hardly ever saw our relatives in Rome and even when they did seek us out and invite us into their glamorous homes we would always find excuses to turn them down. To visit them we needed to take three buses — taxis were out of our budget.”
While Aciman’s mother and brother embrace their new life in Rome, exploring its streets and sights, the young André stays in his bedroom, seeking refuge in books. It is reading about the city and its history in novels that eventually tickles his curiosity enough to encourage him to go out and discover what the Italian capital has to offer.
The most traumatic thing for Aciman is that his uncle enrols him and his brother at an Italian school, several grades below those they had been in at their American school in Alexandria. Uncle Claude tells them they will have to drastically improve their Italian language skills if they wish to move to a more senior year. The boys worry that being in classes with kids much younger than themselves they are unlikely to make close friends. “This was something I hadn’t been prepared to face,” writes Aciman. However, following a conference with their extended family and his father’s intervention, the boys are sent, instead, to Rome’s International School on a scholarship. A Catholic institution, run by the Brothers of the Holy Cross, André is just relieved to have been saved from the humiliation of going to the Italian school.
The International School is some distance away and every day the brothers have to travel an hour each way on the bus. It’s a journey that involves several changes. Even though they get horribly lost going there on their first day, André gets used to the long journey, writing:
“The buses where often crowded with standing room only. I always read novels, while my brother tried to find a seat and, leaning his head against the window, would right away fall asleep.”
Eventually André and his brother, close up to this point, grow apart as his brother, the more outgoing of them, acquires his own circle of friends. André, meanwhile, befriends the owner of the grocery store down the street who loans him a bicycle and it is on this that André finds his way to corners of the city he wouldn’t otherwise be able to reach. While his mother has also made some friends by now, André’s experience of Rome is a more lonely affair. Here he explains:
“It was my habit to buy a book and walk with it to the Spanish Steps. Once I reached the steps, I carried the bike up a few of them and leaned it against the wall, right next to the Keats-Shelley House. This was my spot, listening to the traffic, to the fountain down below, to the voices of tourists snacking and talking. But it was mostly quiet and there were spells when silence descended ever so softly over the city, as though I might have been lying down somewhere, far away from everything. I’d take out my book and start to read.”
When the time comes for the family to leave Rome and head for America, there is sadness. Aciman muses:
“There were echoes of Baudelaire’s Paris all around me. Suddenly the loutish Romanccio, which I learned to love about the time I left Rome, began to acquire an earthly coarseness that at first made it almost tolerable, then vibrant and, in the end, authentic. I had grown to love Rome. What I failed to realise until I went back years later was that I was not only putting books and bookstores between Rome and me; I was putting books between myself and my demons.”
André Aciman’s fiction writing is generally poignant and often almost poetic in style — think Find Me (2019) and Call Me By Your Name (2022). As an autobiographical narrative, My Roman Year is a different animal. One senses the author’s resentment towards certain members of his extended family as well as the circumstances that bring the family to Rome. The bitterness the author clearly still feels as an adult expresses itself in a writing style that veers between somewhat failed attempts at comedy and something akin to reporting. For this reader at least, the former don’t work and the latter results in a dry writing style which, at times, is quite tedious to read.
Any Cop?: Patchy in terms of writing, but undoubtedly interesting for anyone who has been uprooted from their native soil and found themselves having to start life over in a new place. Many with similar experiences will feel great empathy with the author and his attempts to get acquainted with a strange city.
Carola Huttmann
https://bookmunch.wordpress.com/2024/09/09/a-different-animal-my-roman-year-by-andre-aciman/
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