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Overview
A LUSHLY ROMANTIC NOVEL FROM THE AUTHOR OF CALL ME BY YOUR NAME
A young man goes to a Christmas party in upper Manhattan where a woman introduces herself with three simple words: I am Clara. Over the following seven days, they meet every evening at the cinema. Overwhelmed yet cautious, he treads softly. The tension between them builds gradually--marked by ambivalence, hope, and distrust--culminating in a final scene on New Year's Eve charged with magic and the passion. André Aciman yet again explores human emotion with uncompromising accuracy in this piercing new novel. Eight White Nights is a brilliant performance from a master prose stylist.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780312680565 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Picador |
| Publication date: | 02/01/2011 |
| Pages: | 368 |
| Sales rank: | 685,686 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.40(w) x 8.20(h) x 1.10(d) |
About the Author
ANDRÉ ACIMAN is the author of Call Me by Your Name, Out of Egypt, and False Papers, and is the editor of The Proust Project (all published by FSG). He teaches comparative literature at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He lives with his wife and family in Manhattan.
Read an Excerpt
FIRST NIGHT
Halfway through dinner, I knew I’d replay the whole evening in reverse—the bus, the snow, the walk up the tiny incline, the cathedral looming straight before me, the stranger in the elevator, the crowded large living room where candlelit faces beamed with laughter and premonition, the piano music, the singer with the throaty voice, the scent of pinewood everywhere as I wandered from room to room, thinking that perhaps I should have arrived much earlier tonight, or a bit later, or thatI shouldn’t have come at all, the classic sepia etchings on the wall by the bathroom where a swinging door opened to a long corridor to private areas not intended for guests but took another turn toward the hallway and then, by miracle, led back into the same living room, where more people had gathered, and where, turning to me by the window where I thought I’d found a quiet spot behind the large Christmas tree, someone suddenly put out a hand and said, “I am Clara.”
I am Clara, delivered in a flash, as the most obvious fact in the world, as though I’d known it all along, or should have known it, and, seeing I hadn’t acknowledged her, or perhaps was trying not to, she’d help me stop the pretense and put a face to a name everyone had surely mentioned many times before.
In someone else, I am Clara would have sprung like a tentative conversation opener—meek, seemingly assertive, overly casual, distant, aired as an afterthought, the verbal equivalent of a handshake that has learned to convey firmness and vigor by overexerting an otherwise limp and lifeless grip. In a shy person, I am Clara would require so much effort that it might leave her drained and almost grateful when you failed to pick up the cue.
Here, I am Clara was neither bold nor intrusive, but spoken with the practiced, wry smile of someone who had said it too many times to care how it broke the silence with strangers. Strained, indifferent, weary, and amused—at herself, at me, at life for making introductions the tense, self-conscious things they are—it slipped between us like a meaningless formality that had to be gotten over with, and now was as good a time as any, seeing that the two of us were standing away from those who had gathered in the middle of the room and who were about to start singing. Her words sprung on me like one of those gusts that clear through obstacles and throw open all doors and windows, trailing April blossom in the heart of a winter month, stirring everything along their path with the hasty familiarity of people who, when it comes to other people, couldn’t care less and haven’t a thing to lose. She wasn’t bustling in nor was she skipping over tedious steps, but there was a touch of crisis and commotion in her three words that wasn’t unwelcome or totally unintended. It suited her figure, the darting arrogance of her chin, of the voile- thin crimson shirt which she wore unbuttoned to her breastbone, the swell of skin as smooth and forbidding as the diamond stud on her thin platinum necklace.
I am Clara. It barged in unannounced, like a spectator squeezing into a packed auditorium seconds before curtain time, disturbing everyone, and yet so clearly amused by the stir she causes that, no sooner she’s found the seat that will be hers for the rest of the season than she’ll remove her coat, slip it around her shoulders, turn to her new neighbor, and, meaning to apologize for the disruption without making too much of it, whisper a conspiring “I am Clara.” It meant, I’m the Clara you’ll be seeing all year long here, so let’s just make the best of it. I am the Clara you never thought would be sitting right next to you, and yet here I am. I’m the Clara you’ll wish to find here every one day of every month for the remainder of this and every other year of your life—and I know it, and let’s face it, much as you’re trying not to show it, you knew it the moment you set eyes on me. I am Clara.
It was a cross between a ribbing “How couldn’t you know?” and “What’s with the face?” “Here,” she seemed to say, like a magician about to teach a child a simple trick, “take this name and hold it tight in your palm, and when you’re home alone, open your hand and think, Today I met Clara.” It was like offering an elderly gentleman a chocolate- hazelnut square just when he was about to lose his temper. “Don’t say anything until you’ve bitten into it.” She jostled you, but instantly made up for it before you’d even felt it, so that it wasn’t clear which had come first, the apology or the little jab, or whether both weren’t braided in the same gesture, spiraling around her three words like frisky death threats masquerading as meaningless pranks. I am Clara.
Life before. Life after.
Everything before Clara seemed so lifeless, hollow, stopgap. The after-Clara thrilled and scared me, a mirage of water beyond a valley of rattlesnakes.
I am Clara. It was the one thing I knew best and could always come back to each time I’d want to think of her—alert, warm, caustic, and dangerous. Everything about her radiated from these three words, as though they were a pressing bulletin mysteriously scribbled on the back of a matchbook that you slip into a wallet because it will always summon an evening when a dream, a would-be life, suddenly blossomed before you. It could be just that, a dream and nothing more, but it stirred so fierce a desire to be happy that I was almost ready to believe I was indeed happy on the evening when someone blustered in, trailing April blossom in the heart of a winter month.
Would I still feel this way on leaving the party tonight? Or would I find cunning ways to latch on to minor defects so that they’d start to bother me and allow me to snuff the dream till it tapered off and lost its luster and, with its luster gone, remind me once again, as ever again, that happiness is the one thing in our lives others cannot bring.
I am Clara. It conjured her voice, her smile, her face when she vanished into the crowd that night and made me fear I’d already lost her, imagined her. “I am Clara,” I’d say to myself, and she was Clara all over again, standing near me by the Christmas tree, alert, warm, caustic, and dangerous.
I was—and I knew it within minutes of meeting her—already rehearsing never seeing her again, already wondering how to take I am Clara with me tonight and stow it in a drawer along with my cuff links, collar stays, my watch and money clip.
I was learning to disbelieve that this could last another five minutes, because this had all the makings of an unreal, spellbound interlude, when things open up far too easily and seem willing to let us into the otherwise closed circle that is none other than our very own life, our life as we've always craved to live it but cheat it at each turn, our life finally transposed in the right key, retold in the right tense, in a language that speaks to us and is right for us and us alone, our life finally made real and luminous because it's revealed, not in ours, but in someone else's voice, grasped from another's hand, caught on the face of someone who couldn't possibly be a stranger, but, because she is nothing but a stranger, holds our eyes with a gaze that says, Tonight I'm the face you put on your life and how you live it. Tonight, I am your eyes to the world looking back at you. I am Clara.
It meant: Take my name and whisper it to yourself, and in a week's time come back to it and see if crystals haven't sprouted around it.
I am Clara-she had smiled, as though she'd been laughing at something someone had just said to her and, borrowing the mirth started in another context, had turned to me behind the Christmas tree and told me her name, given me her hand, and made me want to laugh at punch lines I hadn't heard but whose drift corresponded to a sense of humor that was exactly like mine.
This is what I am Clara meant to me. It created the illusion of intimacy, of a friendship briefly interrupted and urgently resumed, as though we'd met before, or had crossed each other's path but kept missing each other and were being reintroduced at all costs now, so that in extending her hand to me, she was doing something we should have done much sooner, seeing we had grown up together and lost touch, or been through so much, perhaps been lovers a lifetime ago, until something as trivial and shameful as death had come between us and which, this time, she wasn't about to let happen.
I am Clara meant I already know you-this is no ordinary business-and if you think fate doesn't have a hand in this, think twice. We could, if you wish, stick to ordinary cocktail pleasantries and pretend this is all in your head, or we can drop everything, pay attention to no one, and, like children building a tiny tent in the middle of a crowded living room on Christmas Eve, enter a world beaming with laughter and premonition, where everything is without peril, where there's no place for shame, doubt, or fear, and where all is said in jest and in whimsy, because the things that are most solemn often come under the guise of mischief and merrymaking.
Excerpted from Eight White Nights by André Aciman.
Copyright 2010 by André Aciman.
Published in 2010 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
All rights reserved. This work is protected under copyright laws and reproduction is strictly prohibited. Permission to reproduce the material in any manner or medium must be secured from the Publisher.
What People are Saying About This
From The Washington Post
"For all of love's happy advance notices, for all of its dewy-eyed hype, it's the difficult love — unrequited, hard-won, gone wrong — that makes for a good story. There is something irresistible about romance in the face of open warfare: "Romeo and Juliet," "A Farewell to Arms," "Doctor Zhivago." Or a love kissed by tragedy and doom: "Anna Karenina," "La Bohème." Even if the story is rescued by a happy ending — "Jane Eyre," say, or "Persuasion" — how much sweeter if the road to it is a living hell.
But what if our lovers are contemporary New Yorkers, untouched by war, unfazed by society's obstacles, whose only barrier to the other's heart is a feverish, overactive brain? That is the predicament in André Aciman's psychologically charged, deeply Dostoyevskian new novel, "Eight White Nights."
The comparison to Dostoyevsky is not a casual one. The Russian master's short story "White Nights" lingers over Aciman's novel as firmly as fog over a St. Petersburg winter. From the lovers' chance meeting to their immediate, mutual fascination to the revelation of a troubling former liaison, Dostoyevsky's four surreal nights are embedded here like a literary genetic helix. But beyond that, the similarities stop.
"Eight White Nights" is so quintessentially a Manhattan story that it is hard to imagine it unfolding in St. Petersburg or anywhere else. Strung tightly between Christmas and New Year, as well as between two apartments on the Upper West Side, it involves two protagonists who are equally educated, equally well-off, equally aware of a defining Jewishness and equally ardent aficionados of Rohmer films, Handel sarabandes and unorthodox cocktail conversations. They are also equally hamstrung by their own minds.
Their love story begins at a flamboyant Christmas Eve party in a swank, 106th Street penthouse. "Halfway through dinner," the narrator writes, "I knew I'd replay the whole evening in reverse — the bus, the snow, the walk up the tiny incline, the cathedral looming straight before me, the stranger in the elevator, the crowded large living room where candlelit faces beamed with laughter and premonition, the piano music, the singer with the throaty voice, the scent of pinewood everywhere. . . ." And then, "someone suddenly put out a hand and said, 'I am Clara.' "
From anyone else, that overture might seem flat-footed. But the woman is a striking brunette with a lithe figure, an arrogant chin, a diaphanous red blouse unbuttoned to her breastbone. I am Clara, "spoken with the practiced, wry smile of someone who had said it too many times to care how it broke the silence. . . . With the hasty familiarity of people who, when it comes to other people, couldn't care less and haven't a thing to lose." Our narrator is instantly smitten.
Before long, the two are understanding one another completely, speaking in code, coining vocabulary that will follow them through the next eight days of a dizzyingly obsessive courtship: "pandangst" is their word for depression, "Mankiewicz" for appetizer, "Vishnukrishnu Vindalu" for sexually breathtaking, "otherpeoples" for the vacant faces about them, "Mr. and Mrs. Shukoff" for the bores they wish they could shake off but can't.
The next few days unfold in an uptown bar, an artsy movie theater, an old man's house on the shore of the Hudson River. There are a few irksome matters to resolve: She has a past life to shuck; he has a numbing penchant for perfection. But by the third night, she has him completely in her thrall, calling him Printz, after a cargo ship they see anchored in the river. By the seventh, he is stalking her apartment building, losing his hold on reality, wondering how many men she has enchanted in this way.
She is baffling, impulsive and surpassingly strange. But, then again, so is he. What follows is a mating dance that will either entrance or repel you — a collision of two eccentric souls that grows with mesmerizing intensity. This is a richly intellectual novel that will resemble nothing you've ever encountered. Despite its nods to Dostoyevsky and Rohmer, and for all the references to well-worn landmarks of a familiar city, it is an original to the core.
Then again, Aciman has never failed to be original. Nor is he a stranger to questions of love and alienation. His first book, "Out of Egypt," was a beautifully wrought memoir of his childhood in Alexandria, Egypt. His novel "Call Me by Your Name" was a delicately nuanced, erotic coming-of-age story about a boy's homosexual affair in Italy. With "Eight White Nights," he moves into new territory, probing a rarefied urban culture that seldom has been explored in quite the same way.
The question he finally asks is one Dostoyevsky would surely have appreciated: How can a human being measure a fleeting moment of happiness? Or is it enough for us simply to hold it, cherish it and feed on the warmth of its memory for the rest of our wintry lives?" —Marie Arana
From The Boston Globe
"Part of the great satisfaction in reading André Aciman’s new novel, “Eight White Nights,’’ is experiencing it in a kind of literary real time. Eight chapters, one for each night, trace a nascent love affair between two 20-something New Yorkers. Meting out the reading experience one chapter per day plunges the reader into the pleasure and panic of a relationship’s intense yet uneasy beginnings, with anticipation leading to connection followed by endless self-reflection, congratulation, and doubt. With “Eight White Nights,’’ Aciman, whose first novel was the sensuously detailed “Call Me by Your Name,’’ brilliantly continues his examination into the minefield of longing and attraction.
The “First Night’’ is a swanky Christmas Eve party where the unnamed narrator meets the enigmatic Clara, a graduate student in music. From their first encounter, in which Clara lures the narrator into her world with an extended hand and three simple words, “I am Clara,’’ the two characters establish a skittish push-pull, pretense and manipulation rubbing elbows with brief, searing glimpses of vulnerability and self-revelation. Clara is “alert, warm, caustic, and dangerous.’’ She is also charismatic, clever, beautiful, and extremely bright, and the narrator, previously disillusioned with romance, is immediately spellbound. “Everything before Clara seemed so lifeless, hollow, stopgap,’’ he proclaims. “The after-Clara thrilled and scared me, a mirage of water beyond a valley of rattlesnakes.’’
But as entranced as he is, the narrator is also a cautious realist, doubting the depth and strength of this glitzy party encounter, doubting his own ability to hold onto this captivating creature, wondering whether she is indeed all that she seems. He questions, “Would I still feel this way on leaving the party tonight? Or would I find cunning ways to latch on to minor defects so that they’d start to bother me and allow me to snuff the dream till it tapered off and lost its luster and, with its luster gone, remind me once again, as ever again, that happiness is the one thing in our lives others cannot bring.’’
So even as he reaches forward, the narrator pulls back, withholding. “I was already rehearsing never seeing her again, already wondering how to take I am Clara with me tonight and stow it in a drawer along with my cuff links, collar stays, my watch and money clip.’’
Each meeting thereafter features varying degrees of navel-gazing, soul-searching, and explication. There is the nightly rendezvous at a Rohmer film festival, to which neither will unquestionably commit but each hopes the other will make. There is an impromptu visit to Clara’s old friends in Hudson County. And there is the culminating New Year’s Eve party, accompanied by bald assumptions, missed opportunities, veiled ultimatums, and moments of blazing intensity, with dialogue that crackles with the tension of yearning and uncertainty. Each meeting seems freighted with the unspoken, even though along the way, the lovers develop their own playful language. While it can be cloying to the reader, it feels shockingly, astutely realistic.
It is a fascinating, sometimes infuriating duet the couple dances, the recounting of which often gets mired in the over-the-top, narcissistic replaying of events and conversations. At many points, the reader wants to take these two aside and say, “Enough with the gamesmanship. Just talk to each other and stop reading between the lines.’’ But Aciman charts a vividly insightful profile of the psychology of modern-day courtship, and for anyone who’s ever smarted from the sharp dreamlike unreality of those obsessive early stages of young love, it’s a blistering quick trip down the rabbit hole."
—Karen Campbell
Reading Group Guide
About this Guide
The following author biography and list of questions about Eight White Nights are intended as resources to aid individual readers and book groups who would like to learn more about the author and this book. We hope that this guide will provide you a starting place for discussion, and suggest a variety of perspectives from which you might approach Eight White Nights.
About the Book
A young man goes to a Christmas party in upper Manhattan where a woman introduces herself with three simple words: "I am Clara." Over the following seven days, they meet every evening at the cinema. Overwhelmed yet cautious, he treads softly. The tension between them builds gradually—marked by ambivalence, hope, and distrust—culminating in a final scene on New Year's Eve in a final scene charged with magic and the passion. André Aciman yet again explores human emotion with uncompromising accuracy in this piercing new novel. Eight White Nights is a brilliant performance from a master prose stylist.
About the Author
ANDRÉ ACIMAN is the author of Call Me by Your Name, Out of Egypt, and False Papers, and is the editor of The Proust Project (all published by FSG). He teaches comparative literature at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He lives with his wife and family in Manhattan.
1. What role do language and speech play in the novel? What is the significance of the two characters' invented words and inside jokes (such as "otherpeoples", "amphibalence", and "trenches")?
2. Why does Aciman choose not to reveal the narrator's real name, or his occupation? Why does this make the repeated use of the phrase "I am Clara" in the first night so meaningful?
3. Why do you think Aciman chose to set a novel about Jewish characters at Christmastime? Is there any significance to Clara's name? Why eight nights?
4. How reliable is the narrator, or "Printz Oskar", at pinpointing Clara's emotions and intentions? Do you feel like you are able to understand her character, or does she remain enigmatic?
5. What does a "door number 3 question" mean? Do the characters use this phrase to avoid honesty and/or intimacy?
6. How did you feel about the narrator when he described his older lover with whom he fell out of love and left, and then discovered she had died? Did you sympathize with him, or feel angry at his indifference?
7. Why is Printz so fixated on Inky throughout the story? Why does Clara take him to meet Inky's grandparents?
8. What roles do music and film play in the characters' developing relationship? Would their relationship have been possible without the influence of Rohmer and classical music?
9. On the fifth night, what really happens between the two characters that causes the riff? Is Clara right to be wary of Printz and his intentions? Is Printz really afraid of disappointment – or something else?
10. The narrator places great importance on every word, gesture, and thought from himself and Clara, as if every moment brings them either much closer or further apart. What makes their courtship so precarious? Is their tangled dance necessary to bring them together, or does it just complicate and prolong the inevitable?
11. What does the revelation at the end about Printz's mother's unhappy marriage to his father mean to Printz?
12. Whose is the voice telling Printz to "go back" at the end and not enter the party? Will he finally be able to ignore it?
