ROOM ON THE SEA

In search of lost selves.

In three somber novellas, Aciman reprises themes of longing and memory that have informed his previous memoirs and fiction. “The Gentleman From Peru” is Raúl, who befriends eight young Americans at a resort in southern Italy. A healer and prognosticator, he reveals intimate, unsettling details about their lives, and uncanny revelations about himself. All people, he claims, contain multitudes: a shadow-self, a bygone self, a self living elsewhere, a self that beckons to the future. Raúl singles out Margot, the most skeptical of the group, meeting her for lunches, swims, and walks, and taking her to the house where his family spent summers. As Raúl unfurls the mystery of his connection to Margot, though, what might have been a haunting tale is flawed by a convoluted web of coincidence. Similarly, in “Room on the Sea,” a tender encounter between Paul, a retired lawyer, and Catherine, a soon-to-be-retired psychologist, is undermined by stilted interchanges. They meet in New York awaiting jury duty assignments, and over the course of lunches, coffees, walks on the High Line, and visits to art galleries, they confess frustration with their lives. Both in stale marriages, they seem to be, as Paul puts it, “waiting for something unforeseen to come along.” Catherine agrees: “What I find difficult these days,” she admits, “is being who I am, who I want to be, who I could become.” It’s a difficulty shared by the febrile young narrator of “Mariana,” enraged over having been abandoned after an intense, brief affair. She knew her lover was a womanizer, but he awakened in her a newly discovered passion that she does not want to let go. “It’s me I miss,” she writes to him, “the me I didn’t know existed”: a rapturous, ecstatic self.

Uneven meditations on aging, regret, and loss.