>>> André Aciman is an Egyptian-born writer and
distinguished professor at The Graduate Center of the
City University of New York. He is the author of
several novels, notably Out of Egypt, a memoir of
his childhood in Alexandria, and "Call Me By Your Name",
the film adaptation of which has received numerous
award nominations, including four Oscars.
>>> Your family got to New York. So how did you guys
manage that?
>>> It was very difficult because my father had lost
all his money, all his fortune, his business,
everything was taken away from him when he was
kicked out of Egypt. So we arrived in Italy and we
were basically living off the dole of family members
who had settled way before us, and who had money.
Eventually I went to school in Italy and then
came to the States to go to college. I wanted to go
to the American college and so my parents said,
okay fine, it's a good idea that you go to the States.
We'll come with you.
>>> There's a line in "Out of Egypt", though,
of somebody saying, of thinking about where to go,
like Japan, but not New York because there are
too many Jews in New York.
>>> Yeah, oh, yeah, that was the thing.
New York is filled with Jews. How could you live
with so many Jews? That was my father who said that.
But we came here, and it turned out to be very
hospitable. I mean, immigration does work.
Actually, it's funny, we have the Javits Center behind us.
Senator Javits was behind my coming to the States.
I arrived too late to be admitted into the
fall semester, so I had like four months to do nothing and
I found a job at Lincoln Center as a mail boy,
and it was my immediate induction into the USA,
or at least New York. And it was wonderful because I had a job,
I had money for the first time since ever.
I also like the fact that for the first time in my life I
didn't have to hide that I was Jewish.
>>> I think it's probably why a lot of gay men
come to New York.
>>> It's so open. Yeah, it's an open world.
And it's an amazing place. I mean you don't even have
to tell people you're gay because they don't care.
>>> Is the story of the adaptation of Call Me By
Your Name, is that interesting? I mean, the fact that it's an
older man and a younger boy....
>>> It was never any question about that,
the older/younger thing. Some of the people who
discussed it- and I hate discussing it- they call
him a child. You know, he's not a child.
Maybe legally he is in the States, but he's not
in Europe. And... get over it, okay? It is he who makes
the passes, he who establishes...it's the other
guy saying, no, I don't want to, it would be
wrong. Most people assume that an author is so
possessive of his work that...
>>> He doesn't want to see it changed.
>>> He doesn't want to see it changed. He does not
want to see it altered, or even touched up. When I
discovered that James Ivory was going to do the
script and that Luca was going to film, and I knew
both their work- and I know nothing about movies,
but I knew both of them- I said, this is ideal.
I have to shut up and let them do what they want to do.
I was on the set for a few times and....
>>> You're in it.
>>> I'm in it, yeah. They coaxed me into that.
You want to be in the film? Yeah, I don't know.
>>> One of the gay uncles, or something.
>>> Yeah, exactly, and the person who is my partner
is in fact the producer of the movie, so we have
this amazing moment.
>>> And what I love about it, too, is it's not just,
say, the shame of homosexuality. It's also
happening with the boy and his girlfriend. I was
thinking that this is, you know, pre-gadget,
pre-texting and communication,
where everything happened just in what you could do
face-to-face with somebody. I remember how
terrifying it was at the age of 16 or 18 to
actually reveal feelings to someone.
>>> God, but you know why it's terrifying? It's not
terrifying because of the kind of sexuality. I think
fundamentally desire is shameful. Whatever ethic
you belong to, to want somebody, to want to hold them,
to want to touch them and do something with
them is embarrassing if you don't know what
they want, and eventually, if you see them every day,
you break down.
>>> Let's talk about the pan-sexuality that happens
in a lot of your books. It strikes me that that's
long been a condition of human existence, but it
feels to me like in the modern period we've sort
of striated into these categories or something.
>>> I think so.
>>> I feel now, strangely enough, that gender
orientation, these things are sort of breaking down,
like there's a prescience in some of what you've
been writing about that feels very relevant to right now.
>>> I don't think about it as I'm writing. I go where
my gut tells me to go. Sometimes it's below my
gut but, I mean, I go there. I realized that
when you write you cannot have shame. I can have
shame with people, but I cannot have shame when
I write. If I'm going to write, I'm going to have
to say what it is that I feel. And I find that
younger people, people who are not even 20 today,
are totally comfortable with this kind of malleable and
floating free sexuality. One day they are this,
the other hour they are that, they are both at the same time.
Isn't this what humanity has always been like?
>>> I've noticed in a lot of writing recently that
there are these sort of nonlinear models, where
you jump around, and maybe Enigma Variations is one
of those. Is that a trend in writing?
>>> I think it is a trend. I did it for totally
different reasons because I had these chapters of
my life, of my imaginary life, that weren't reconciled,
and I wasn't going to reconcile them into a large novel,
where the character was one day this and one
day he does that. I didn't want these connectives
that would create sort of fraudulent transitions.
I do think that the traditional traditional realist novel
is dead and should be dead because it's awful,
but I think that most people who write in that tradition,
they do it in a kind of kaleidoscope effect.
>>> Yeah, they might be imitating cinematic narrative,
in a sense, right?
>>> They might be. It's kind of that, or it's more
like the cartoon situation where you move from
one image to another image that has not connected.
You're supposed to create the transitions yourself
in your head and then you realize, oh my God,
this is where it's going, I get it, okay. I have no
patience for these kind of experimental novels.
>>> Now, you cover similar themes in so many of your
books across different books and in different
forms and I feel like in some ways you don't try
to do everything in one volume. In some ways,
I think maybe if you look up at the shelf at the books
you've written, that that in some ways it becomes a
total work of art. Is that something you consciously
steer toward now as you're....
>>> As I'm about to die? [laughter] No, it's more
like there are young people who write with the
sense that they're accomplishing an oeuvre
that's going to have a particular voice, and I'm
saying to them that therefore you are writing
basically one book many, many times. I'm against that.
I think that everything I've written is different
because I've written about, you know, exile and sexuality,
and God, how are you going to reconcile those?
But it's usually about a certain problem that I have,
and I'll tell you what it is, not that you asked, but it's
the trouble with living in the hear and now.
I don't know how to do that. I don't know how to be
in the moment, or as Montaigne used to say,
when I dance, I dance, when I sleep, I sleep,
when I eat, I eat. I don't know how to do that.
That's not me.
>>> It's so macho.
>>> Oh yeah, it is a bit much.