Word: nightsã
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Hiding in the greenhouse of a lavish apartment on the Upper West Side of New York, the protagonist of “Eight White Nights?? sees his life flash before his eyes as he tastes a spicy hors d’oeuvre. This moment appears to be directly inspired by Proust’s episode of the madeleine—in fact, André Aciman’s entire second novel reads like an exercise in bringing a feverish Proustian narrative to twenty-first century Manhattan. This novel, which blurs the boundaries between supermarket romance and literary fiction...
...plot is unabashedly gimmicky, clashing with Aciman’s rhythmic and ornamented sentences. “Eight White Nights?? opens with a (heavily repeated) hook—“I am Clara”—with which the main love interest introduces herself. It then breaks into an eight-part narrative, in which each part chronicles a different night that the unnamed narrator spends with Clara. He meets her while lurking behind the tree at a Christmas party and is instantly and fatally drawn towards her. Smart and mean, Clara scintillates with brilliance...
...bulk of the narrative follows the protagonist and his longings, desires, and solipsistic rants as he yearns after Clara and analyses her every gesture. Though laden with the narrator’s passionate obsession for Clara, “Eight White Nights?? chronicles an essentially chaste love. Aciman denies the reader the full range of the sensuous prose that he unquestionably mastered in his first novel, “Call Me By Your Name,” and consequently creates a more emotionally tentative work...
...only dynamic motif in “Eight White Nights?? is the coded language that the lovers invent in order to communicate with each other. One of Aciman’s more inspired devices, it infuses the relationship between Clara and the protagonist with the warmth and poignancy of two kindred spirits attempting to invent a hermetic universe for themselves. They invent the terms “otherpeoples” and “Shukoffs” in their very first conversation, referring to the mass of boring, unimaginative humans who surround them. Their conversation continues, full...
Aciman’s effort in “Eight White Nights?? to imitate Proust and constantly dwell within thoughts, metaphors, code-phrases, and imagined scenes of passion is misguided. The prose is feverish and obsessive; though his writing occasionally reaches lyrical heights, the banality of his subjects often overpowers. It particularly raises the question of whether the flowery, (pand)angsty voice of the narrator isn’t just Aciman’s projection of how he believes women want men to think, feel and obsess over them, since there doesn’t appear...