In Love with France, At Home In Italy

In his autobiographical memoir, Speak, Memory, Vladimir Nabokov, (my obsession for whom predates my current one for Andre Aciman), says, " One is always at home in one's past...." Andre Aciman, in "Becket's Winter" (from his collection of essays, "False Papers") speaks about the lie of the memory: "... all we have in the end is ourself, our loneliness – not even our memories but how they've lied to us...." Earlier in that same piece, Aciman includes a 17-line single sentence worthy of Proust, but infinitely easier to follow. After seeing the film, "Becket," for the first time as a teenager in Alexandria, he viewed the film countless times, in three other countries and in my three favorite languages, French, English, and Italian. The last few words of the long sentence I mention state that, like King Henry in the movie, "... I, too, one day would have to learn to be alone again, but in the end the work of memory is ...

DESPITE BEING MARRIED TO THE SAME MAN FOR DECADES, I CONFESS TO STILL FALLING IN LOVE QUITE REGULARLY. BUT NOT WITH ANYTHING OR ANYBODY ANYONE COULD BE JEALOUS OF. PAR EXEMPLE/AD ESSEMPIO/FOR EXAMPLE, THE ITALIAN GERUND, AND FRANZ KAFKA. Not to mention Albert Camus and Voltaire, with whom I'm in constant communication by letter. And lest you think I only fall for long-dead guys, I'll add the already married Andre Aciman, who had me from the first line of "Lavender" (See  DEAR ANDRE ACIMAN ).  And also my friend, Jacqueline Raoul-Duval, whose "Kafka in Love" is a revelation. I'm also torn between having an affair with two quite different literary detectives. At first I could never imagine the Sicilian Montalbano having a worthy rival. But then Donna Leon's Commissario Brunetti came along, and now I don't know what to do. (See  THE MYSTERY OF HOW I FELL UNDER THE SPELL OF WRITE... )   And on the topic of quirky love affairs, I used to be in love ...

The “Hallelujah Chorus” is gloriously blaring, the mist over our valley is dissipating, and the hunters have temporarily stopped shooting (after all, it IS lunchtime in Italy). I’m thinking about letters: the one I posted here but never sent to Andre Aciman, the one Kafka never sent to the father who terrorized him, and the one Commissario Montalbano just wrote to himself in the novel I’m reading. Unlike the way it happened with Andre Aciman, with whom it was love at first sentence, it took me a while to get hooked on the Sicilian detective Montalbano. Although I went through an adolescent phase of devouring Mickey Spillane and his ilk, that is no longer my thing. Like the Italian husband who doesn’t “get” what his wife sees in the TV version of what he calls the “really short, bald, bow-legged Montalbano” who so often seems to be having an exasperated temper tantrum over the stupidity that surrounds him, I’m surprised at myself. I’m rethinking quite a number o...

This is the weirdest kind of fan letter, but I know that you will understand. How many times have I read book reviews in the New York Times that made me want to run right out and read the book, yet I never follow up on it? Well, this time started out as only a minor exception. I was cautious. I asked the library to buy the book so I could see if my instinct that we were meant for each other was right. As a so-called writing expert and specialist in French literature, I do not give my writing heart up to just anyone. But the evidence that you might be the one was there. As I think back to that article I'm trying to recall just what it was that snared me. Was it the lavender? I never actually thought I'd like its scent, but now that I have become a newborn in Italy, I have a special relationship with this flower whose relaxing and sleep-inducing properties I have come to appreciate. Or was it all of those references to Marcel Proust? Well he and I have had a thorny relat...