Customer Reviews

Eight White Nights: A Novel

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

Author Andre Aciman's intense analysis of a budding romance between two New Yorkers in their late twenties reveals every conversation, every thought, every re-thought, every imagined slight, every regret about lost opportunities, and every romantic question in the lives of these two characters as they test the waters for a new relationship. An unnamed narrator accustomed to the good life (and, apparently, with no need to work), meets Clara Brunschvicg at a posh Christmas party on the Upper West Side. Clara meets the speaker behind the Christmas tree, and introduces herself with the words, "I am Clara."

As the evening progresses, the reader watches the interactions of the speaker and Clara--the oneupsmanship, the "gotcha moments," the arch smart-aleckyness of two educated people trying to impress each other with how bright and "with it" they are. Literary references fall from their lips with ease--Homer, poet Henry Vaughan, and Dostoevsky appear in their early conversations. They even invent their own "cute" vocabulary as they chat: "Pandangst" for pandemic anxiety, "Shukoffs" for people they want to avoid at the party, "VishnukrishnuVindalu" for sexuality, "the rose garden" for love. They discover, not surprisingly, that they are both fans of the art films of experimental French filmmaker Eric Rohmer, who features articulate young people in new romances which play havoc with their psyches.

By the time the speaker leaves the Christmas Eve party, he is fantasizing about a future with Clara and has made plans to meet her at a Rohmer film the next night. In the meantime, he analyzes and overanalyzes every moment of their meeting and their conversations, dithering constantly about the impression he may have made and what she may have thought.

Each of the nights between Christmas Eve and New Year's Eve is described in detail from the point of view of the speaker, and in this respect, the plot parallels Fyodor Dostoevsky's short story, "White Nights." Other motifs in the novel include the speaker's tendency to walk the city (another parallel to Dostoevsky) and spend time in nearby Straus Park, which features a statue entitled "Memory." Not surprisingly, considering the subject matter, the author has chosen to set the story in the depths of winter.

As the relationship between the speaker and Clara develops, with all its misunderstandings, real and imagined, the novel's intense and heady prose conjures up vibrant images, and the dialogue, both real and imagined, is full of suggestive meanings. The sophisticated structure rewards careful reading, and the novel's style ranks with the finest of literary fiction. Unfortunately, however, the two main characters are not likable--he dithers and quakes and can't decide, while she manipulates and plays mind games--and some readers will not want to bother to find out what happens to these people--or worse, will not care. Mary Whipple

Eight White Nights: A Novel Aciman's novel is an in-depth analysis of a romance involving, it would seem, two New York intellectuals in their late twenties. It is a strange journey. In intellectualism New York fashion everything is analyzed and re-analyzed. The conversations, thoughts, movements, reactions, every tiny little gesture laid out for study. And, of course, what is thought but not said, and what could possibly have been thought an said by the main character, the unnamed narrator who sees it all, senses it all, and is as omni-potent as a combine of Freud, Marcüse and Sartre.

It starts with a Christmas party on the Upper West Side, Riverside Drive. Clara meets the speaker behind the Christmas tree, and introduces herself with the words, "I am Clara." Then follows page after page about the introduction. "I am Clara". Which to me seems very much like the ordinary, customary, relatively polite way of introducing oneself at a party. But for Aciman this seemingly is a revelation. Three words signifying a world of opportunity.

Starting from this odd night, each of the following nights are discussed and described in pretty much the same level of detail. And as the relationship develops - admittedly with some funny and amusing misunderstandings - more suggestive meanings are conjured. But nothing really happens? They don't - as one might put it - consummate the relationship. And from start to end there are lots of really deep discussions, yet even so, I can't honestly say that I ever felt I really came close to the characters - their souls, what made them tick, the inner beings.

I have noticed that the book has received a lot of rave reviews, but I really beg to differ. To my mind this is an author too interested in his own voice and what he considers wonderful sentences and expressions. Listen to this:

"From our high perch, the silver-purple city looked aerial and distant and superterrestial, a beguiling kingdom whose beaming spires rose silently through the twilit winter mist to parlay with the stars. I watched the fresh furrowed tracks on Riverside Drive, the scattered lampposts with their heads ablaze, and a bus crawling through the snow, tilting its way ppast the knoll off the 112th and Riverside before shuffling off, snow padding its lank shoulders, an empty, Stygian vessel headed toward destinations and sights unseen. I am like Clara, it said, I'll take you places you never knew."

Sure, this is sophisticated. But it is also completely vacuous! It doesn't push the novel forward - and indeed, there are a lot of paragraphs like this one. As if there really is no story to tell, at least not a story more important than the voice of the author. To me, this is grand-standing. Aciman is posing. And poseurs quickly become quite boring. Give me instead life, flesh, movement, emotion, tears and joy. Give me real people and a real story. 360 pages of posing are 340 pages too many!

In an age of dumbed-down, pigeon-holed, pandering literature, Eight White Nights reminds us that it is still possible to write a masterful work. Aciman has entered the pantheon of writers whose work will be read and taught for generations. No book in recent memory has leaped headlong into the iffiness and muddle of romance so profoundly, as the unnamed narrator exposes the endless implications of a word or a gesture or an apparent mixed signal.

Aciman's groundbreaking memoir Out of Egypt (and much of his other nonfiction) reveals an obsession with geographic uncertainty. Apparently, fiction has given Aciman the no-holds-barred courage to rev it into high gear as he excavates the heart's similar ambivalence. Eight White Nights forces the issue. Aciman makes the reader squirm, as there is no escaping what we find when cornered into previously unprobed, endless levels of anxiety and insecurity in ourselves.

Residents of New York City's Upper West Side may appreciate the local action, but familiarity is unnecessary as this story needs no location. Similarly, educated readers will appreciate the influence of Keats, Dostoyevsky, Joyce and many others, but those who don't will miss nothing as they reel from the impact of this masterpiece.

After reading Andre Aciman's first novel, "Call Me By Your Name", I knew that this new novel, "Eight White Nights" would be exactly the type of book I would want to read. Not only that, I also knew that I would read the book out loud to myself from the beginning to the end much like listening to it on audio. Aciman has a real knack for lyrical writing and unlike some of the other reviewers here who didn't appreciate that so much, I never tire of reading his prose and much of it is so beautiful, I stopped right then and there and read those parts over again and again. Yes, it took me two weeks to finish the book that way, but I don't begrudge one second of that time and I know I'll do it again.

I must admit that I was hooked on the book early because I once lived in Manhattan on the Upper West Side in the late `60's and early `70's not far from one of the significant locations in the book which was 106th Street and Riverside drive. When I was there, I lived on Broadway, one avenue block east and 111th Street, five blocks north. That close proximity of the two adjacent neighborhoods brought back many pleasant memories. It won't be necessary to have that connection though for you to enjoy the book. As other reviews have indicated, the novel chronicles the beginning of a relationship between a woman named Clara and an unnamed male narrator. The man dissects what happens between the two in almost every psychological way possible. I love psychological novels and it didn't bother me that there were many things not to like about both the man and the woman because that's true in real life as well. Think about it, have you ever met anyone in life who is totally likable and has no flaws at all or very few?

Reading Aciman's fiction puts me in mind of another of my favorite authors because of the psychological aspects of the writing and because of the very lyrical tone of his prose. Thomas Wolfe's last two novels also had much of New York City as many of it's locations as well because he lived for awhile in Brooklyn. Both Aciman and Wolfe wrote in their own unique styles where the action of the pieces are internal action. Another author springs to mind with that same comparison, Virgina Woolf. If you like either Thomas Wolfe or Virginia Woolf , You'll find Andre Aciman's prose very satisfying.

I have a love-love relationship with New York City books, that is, books based in New York, about New York's ideas and ideals (or the quest to create such), books populated with New York's oddballs, eccentrics, wordsmiths, artists, everyday characters, mothers, children, you get the point. I don't even mind a little pretension peppered in there, because, well, let's face it, among the city's residents are some of the more self-consciously aware, brainy, grown-up and successful nerds you're bound to find on the planet. Ok, all that being said, I find it nearly impossible to get through a third of this book, even though I started with the best of hopes and found myself initially drawn in by the language and the observation of daily details and subtler human emotions. There was too much there. The lily was gilded and then bronzed and then gilded again. The layering of detail upon detail, the mining of every possible nuance from the soil of how we feel, how we are, what we are, etc. might aspire to the Proustian as one newspaper reviewer put it, but for me, for me, the result was something very crafted, contrived, and overblown... not at all human. I don't think we as a people feel or remember this way. It is something computerized, mechanical, edited for effect. All of the "I am Clara's and I x y z.." were enough to make me audibly groan at certain moments, to the point that after the last such time, my wife turned and kindly but firmly reminded me that I DID have a choice in the matter.

I finished this book on an airplane and I cried. I recall once years ago finishing something on an airplane and crying. It was John Barth's Chimera, and when the suit next to me looked at me oddly, all I could do was mumble, "It was so beautiful." So, to forestall committing a spoiler, I want say I did not cry because the end was unhappy or happy, but because it was so emotional for me. Which brings us to the characters. The book recounts the relations between a 20-something going on 14 couple from their meeting on Christmas Eve to New Years Eve in wintery New York mostly on the upper west side around 106th St. Like Aciman's previous novel, Call Me By Your Name, it is about the relation between passion and the development of a sense of self. They are intelligent and educated. Scattered literary and musical allusions are primarily important to the couple, but not to the reader, the reverse of the practice in some modernist novels, say, Ulysses. The connection with Dostoyevsky's story Four White Nights is a little complicated, and I can't explain it without spoilers, but I suggest you read it first. They travel in affluent circles if they are not affluent themselves. They are Jewish, passionate, and neurotic. More than once I thought of giving up in disgust at heir self-defeating maneuvers. You want shake them and say, 'Come on, get it on or get over it'. One thing that helped me hang with them was knowing that Aciman is a noted Proust scholar and recalling that the neurotic obsessions of Swann and Marcel are ultimately meaningful. The sketches of several minor characters are full-bodied and engaging, particularly of the POV's parents and of an old couple that serve as surrogate family to the heroine. The couple bond, among many other ways by mutually caricaturing other characters, except the parental figures, in a self-centered and even mean-spirited way as people trying to define themselves often do. The dialogue is terrific, some of it might have wandered in from Oscar Wild. They develop between them, not a special language, but, again as people defining themselves by love do, an important special vocabulary. I happen to have once lived in that neighborhood, and evocation of New York is intense and winning. The writing is terrific; particularly the POV's eloquent and insightful self regard, no matter how neurotic. No one wants to compare to Proust, but like Marcel this unwise young man squeezes out a lot of wisdom eloquently.

"Eight White Nights" is a lot to take in--in the best possible way. Compelling and original, the book is beautifully written. It captures the darts and dashes, the intimate thoughts and longings, the intensity of the young (in every way) passion of the two main characters with such power that it's hard to put down. But read slowly to let the full sensuality and intelligence of the book wash over you. This is a truly rewarding, moving, brilliantly articulate and thoughtful book.

Aciman is always completely original & unforeseen to say the least. Eight White Nights is a gorgeous book, deeply felt & a very sensual novel. I'd give it six stars & conclude by saying it was totally captivating & a hell of a lot of fun to read.

Dennis Keith

I've been following Aciman's work for years. This is his most intelligent, most beautiful and most ambitious work. Everything from the first night to the eighth is filled with the agony and the beauty of romance. Having finished the novel, I can still hear his voice in my head. I don't want it to go away.

Having reached page 39, I give up. I just can't get into this book at all. I started it four days ago and found it boring from the first page. I tried to keep reading, thinking it had to get better but I had such trouble maintaining my interest in the book that I began and finished three other books while still struggling to find the point in this book at which it would become interesting. It didn't. I have too many other books I want to read to waste any more time on this one. It's very rare for me to give up on a book but this one is one of those rare ones.