The Gentleman From Peru by André Aciman — marooned with Margot

Despite its sun-dappled Italian setting, The Gentleman From Peru, the Italian-American writer André Aciman’s sixth novel, is a far cry from those he has written before. Raúl, a white-bearded, 60-something lone wolf staying at a resort on the Amalfi Coast, is the gentleman in question. A group of young Americans on a yachting holiday is marooned in port, among them Margot — a gallerist simply described as “snarky”.

At first, Raúl introduces himself as someone who can heal physical pain simply by touch, but it soon becomes apparent that he has clairvoyant powers too. He ingratiates himself into the group by telling each one something about their lives that no one else could have known.

If your first reaction on reading this is a degree of confusion, you’re in the same boat as the Americans. It turns out that Raúl is indeed a magical figure — someone who can travel through the underworld and guide people back to their previous lives. Like Shakespeare’s Prospero on his island, he is waiting for someone from his past to return and set him free.

That someone is Margot, whom Raúl believes to be a reincarnation of his first love, Marya, who died 40 years ago. If true lovers don’t die together, he thinks, then the partner who lives on is doomed to wait for his beloved to return. It may take them years and rebirths to reunite — but reunite they do. “It’s life that is provisional, not love,” he says.

One never gets the feeling that the characters matter in The Gentleman From Peru as much as this central idea. The only thing we know about the Americans in the present life are their job titles. Evidently, Margot’s present self matters little to Raúl — he is fixated on Marya’s reincarnation — but a reader might find themselves wanting more. When Margot finds out about Marya, Raúl says: “You see, you didn’t die. You just went away.” Yet we don’t even hear that much about Marya.

The older male lover plot is familiar from Aciman’s previous work. Think of a teenage Elio pining for the American student Oliver in the bestselling Call Me By Your Name (later turned into a film), or its sequel, Find Me, set 15 years later in Paris, when Elio starts seeing an attorney twice his age. In his 2017 novel Enigma Variations, an older cabinet maker causes the sexual awakening of a 12-year-old Italian boy.

While the dazzling erotic prose in these novels grip you right from the start, in The Gentleman From Peru the trope flounders. The book ends up reading less like a novel and more like a long, patched-up explanation as to why this gentleman from Peru should end up in bed with a young woman.

If the plot rings false or seems forced, it’s perhaps because Aciman himself is not confident writing in a magical realist genre. It’s hardly an original idea that the human soul awaits in the shadows a lifetime for true love and alignment — it’s a deluxe western repackaging of an ancient Indian myth. True love does eventually arrive in the novel. What doesn’t arrive is its true meaning. 

The Gentleman From Peru by André Aciman Faber & Faber £12.99, 176 pages

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