False Papers by Andre Aciman
False Papers is a collection of memories, memoires in, I suppose, the original French meaning of the word. And what memories! Andre Aciman grew up in one of the last Jewish families in Alexandria—a family in which a sign of parental affection was an introduction to Proust—and passed through Rome, Paris, Harvard before ending up in Manhattan.
In the interests of full disclosure, I must admit that I was at University with the author—and I haven’t seen him since graduation. My memories of him are now inevitably coloured by his writings (which include Out of Egypt, a longer treatment of his boyhood and family in Alexandria) and my own visits to the places he mentions, including Alexandria—and that is, perhaps, one of the points the author is making here, that memories are filtered by all the experiences we have had since. The past is what we remember it to be.
These essays could have easily been recast as short stories, but why bother writing fiction when reality is like this?
My grandmother knew Greek well enough to correct native Greeks, she knew every prayer in Latin, and her written French, when she was vexed, would have made Saint-Simon quite nervous.This is one of those books where one reads each sentence over again, and then each paragraph, as if it were a poem. Is there the literary equivalent of ‘composition’ in painting? If there were, and if I knew the name for it, these essays would be some of the best examples I could think of. The sentences change cadence and flow into each other and the essays shimmer, not unlike, perhaps, the sun on the Mediterranean.
That city no longer exists; perhaps it never did. Nor does the Alexandria I knew: the mock-reliquary of bygone splendor and colonial opulence where my grandmother could still walk with an umbrella on sunny days and not realize she looked quite ridiculous, the way everyone in my family must have looked quite ridiculous, being the last European Jews in a city where anti-Western nationalism and anti-Semitism had managed to reduce the Jewish population from at least fifty thousand to twenty-five hundred by 1960 and put us at the very tail end of those whom history shrugs aside when it changes its mind.
We have in Asia a number of places and people whom “history shrugs aside when it changes its mind”. Macau is one. Four, almost five, centuries of Portuguese presence in southern China is eroding away and is preserved merely in stasis, under glass.
It can of course be argued that the return of Macau to China was right and proper, and that Macau itself was the product of colonialism—just as one can argue that Greek shopkeepers, Ladino Jews and other remnants of the cosmopolitan Levant were merely products of colonialism and deserved to be swept away by resurgent Arab and Egyptian nationalism. Maybe. But that Alexandria is gone for good now. And everyone—not just the author—lost something important in its passing.
And what of Hong Kong then? One should look at Alexandria with a certain amount of trepidation.
Broader issues aside, Aciman’s personal sense of loss, of being without a home (the book is subtitled Essays on Exile and Memory) should trigger recognition in many Asian readers, especially in Hong Kong where ‘home’ is often a fluid concept at best.
Aciman lives in several cultures and, it seems, several languages simultaneously: he is multilingual and multicultural in a way few people in America are—but as many people in Asia are. This gives a freedom and flexibility but can also result in rootlessness.
Aciman may write about Manhattan and Rome and Alexandria, but it could have almost as easily been about Macau, Hong Kong, Vancouver and London.