André Aciman’s memoir details how forced exile diminished him

My Roman Year
André Aciman
Faber & Faber

André Aciman is an American writer and academic best known for his novel Call Me By Your Name, which was later filmed.

His latest book, My Roman Year, is a memoir of the year 1966 which he, his deaf mother and his younger brother spent in Rome after they were exiled from Egypt by former president Gamal Abdel Nasser, who wanted to rid his country of foreigners and their influence.

The family were Jewish, with roots in the Levant and Turkey, but after the 1950s and 1960s changed the face of that locale, they became part of a wide rootless diaspora, with relatives going to America,  North and South, and others spreading out over Europe. It is this rootlessness that characterises Aciman’s memoir as he struggles to establish his identity as an awkward adolescent, newly poor and unmistakably foreign.

When the family left Alexandria, the author and his brother were at school, but had to take on a good deal of responsibility for their mother. Their father remained behind to salvage what he could for the family, and when he did eventually leave Egypt, he moved to Paris as soon as possible.

The Aciman family could best be described as dysfunctional, and the parents had almost nothing in common, not even affection. Their contact in Italy was Aciman’s Uncle Claude, who was helpful to a point, but extraordinarily unpleasant. He found them accommodation in a former brothel he owned in a very poor part of town, and controlled their scanty finances with a ruthless hand.

Aciman began his year by hating Rome and everything about it — the people, the dialect, the English school he was sent to and his poverty, which he convinced himself made everyone, but particularly his relations, patronise him. He longed to escape to anywhere as long as it was not Rome. A trip to Paris to see his father, and along the way to lose his virginity, was a moment of relief. He retreated into an interior world of books, as he describes it, to shield himself from himself.

However, slowly things change. He makes tentative friendships and begins to find a sense of belonging. When he wins a scholarship to an American university, the thought of leaving Rome is almost unbearable.

Perhaps the book could have benefitted from being a little shorter, particularly in the early chapters. However, Aciman’s musing on how a person and a place can become entwined, and how rootlessness and forced exile diminish one, is fascinating and moving.

My Roman Year is a coming-of-age memoir, but it goes deeper into the human psyche than the transition from adolescence to adulthood.