WHEN, IN 2005 and 2006, a mysterious sweet smell wafted across Staten Island, Brooklyn, and Manhattan, it discomfited already jittery New Yorkers. The same thing happened again three years later. Finally, the smell was identified: fenugreek, carried on breezes from a New Jersey flavor and fragrance factory. The incident reminded me of a passage in André Aciman’s fine 1995 memoir, Out of Egypt, in which he writes about the fragrance of hilba, fenugreek. Arab Egyptians drank it for its curative powers, and reeked afterward, but for many Alexandrian Jews who aspired to being European, nothing could be more déclassé than the smell of hilba. Aciman’s father called it une odeur d’arabe, an Arab smell, and hated any trace of it in the house or on his clothes. But, Aciman points out, “all homes bear ethnic odors,” and from the various smells of foods and perfumes the stories of communities and persons emerge. The opening chapter of Alibis, Aciman’s beautiful new book of essays, is an extended aria on the sense of smell.
The fragrance in this case is lavender. Lavender, first encountered in his father’s aftershave, and then used as a home cure for migraines, is the madeleine—Aciman’s debt to Proust is deep and freely acknowledged—that opens up a cascade of memories. Memories of childhood, youth, marriage, and fatherhood are narrated in counterpoint with a dizzying tour of the varieties of lavender. The essay becomes a story about Aciman’s discovery of different lavenders, lavenders associated with people, places, and half-forgotten encounters. His enthusiasm, expressed in meandering, enumerative sentences, is intense and catching:
There were light, ethereal lavenders; some were mild and timid; others lush and overbearing; some tart, as if picked from the field and left to parch in large vats of vinegar; others were overwhelmingly sweet. Some lavenders ended up smelling like an herb garden; others, with hints of so many spices, were blended beyond recognition. I experimented with each one, purchased many bottles, not just because I wanted to collect them all or was searching for the ideal lavender—the hidden lavender, the ur-lavender that superseded all other lavenders—but because I was eager to either prove or disprove something I suspected all along: that the lavender I wanted was none other than the one I’d grown up with and would ultimately turn back to once I’d established that all the others were wrong for me.
After this prefatory inspiration, Alibis exhales into a pursuit of evanescence. Most of its chapters are travel essays, and Aciman is a spirited guide, sensitive to history but alive also to food, sunshine, art, and aimless wandering. The pleasure of reading him resides in the pleasure of his company. He knows a lot, and often gets carried away, but he also knows how to doubt himself. If his destinations seem conventional—Paris, Barcelona, Rome—his engagement with them is idiosyncratic. His mission is to “unlock memory’s sluice gates,” and it is a mission he accomplishes through the art of the essay itself: “You write not after you’ve thought things through; you write to think things through.”
Aciman returns to memory obsessively, looking for the words that can help him understand it better, finding solace in the idea of being in one place while desiring another, not for the sake of being in that other place, but for the sake of desire itself. Visiting Egypt, he remembers how the smell from a certain falafel place in New York used to fill him with a deep longing for the small falafel establishments he had known in Egypt. But, in the course of this memory, he also realizes that the falafel place in New York matches his dream of Egyptian falafel more closely than can Egypt falafel itself. This displacement of desire is Aciman’s favorite move, one he deploys in several of the essays in Alibis. The imbricated feelings owe something to the ironies of the seventeenth-century roman d’analyse. Aciman cites Madame de La Fayette’s Princesse de Clèves, which was particularly dear to him; in it, a woman who wishes to regain her lover doesn’t merely feign indifference but feigns an effort to mask her feigned indifference.
But there is something more than mere irony or dissimulation going on in Aciman’s case. In one passage he writes: “What we missed was not just Egypt. What we missed was dreaming Europe in Egypt—what we missed was the Egypt where we’d dreamed of Europe.” On revisiting an apartment building in Rome, he recalls: “At fifteen, I visited the life I wished to lead and the home I was going to make my own some day. Now, I was visiting the life I had dreamed of living.” Of Cambridge, Massachusetts, he writes: “Here, at twenty-five, I had conjured the life I wished to live one day. Now, at fifty, I was revisiting the life I’d dreamed of living.” Writing of Monet’s painting in Bordighera, on the Riviera, he speculates that Monet “realized that he liked painting this town more than he loved the town itself, because what he loved was more in him than in the town itself, though he needed the town to draw it out of him.” And he describes his own experience as a young refugee in Rome thus: “I’d grown to love old Rome, a Rome that seemed more in me than it was out in Rome itself, because, in this very Rome I’d grown to love, there was perhaps more of me in it than there was of Rome.”
What is one to make of this insistent ostinato? Certainly it gives a picture of Aciman’s mind: his love of recursion and contradiction, of being “elsewhere” (this is how he defines the “alibis” of the title), of cultivating shadow-selves and always feeling out of place. And, certainly, memory is nothing if not repetitive. But it is also evident that some of these repetitions are simply due to the essays’ having been written at different times for different magazines and journals. This leads to some inconsistencies of tone, and some infelicities in the otherwise fine text. For instance, having already written on Monet, Aciman mentions, in the course of another essay, “the painter Claude Monet,” as though we had never heard of him; La Princesse de Clèves is introduced twice; and a metaphor about old houses leaning on each other for support, striking though it is, surely wasn’t intended to show up in an essay about Rome as well as in one about Venice.
Nevertheless, Aciman’s deep fidelity to the world of the senses, and to the translation of those sensations into prose, makes Alibis a delight. We enjoy, with him, the satisfactions of coincidences, and (to put it as he might) of dreaming of pasts in which we dreamed of the future from which we are now dreaming of the past. Aciman writes of Proust that “memory and wishful thinking are filters through which he registers, processes and understands present experience.” The same has long been true of Aciman himself, and this fragrant book further bolsters his reputation as one of our best wishful thinkers.