‘The Gentleman from Peru’: André Aciman’s novel mourns (or celebrates) lives spent in waiting

If the thought of a past love strikes you with nostalgia alone, you are fairly well-positioned. But, if you sense the prying echoes of a chance foregone or a door un-shut, the position is plagued by troublesome things. That the characters in his novels get this positioning right is the result of André Aciman’s passionate insistence.

Moving on is not something Aciman’s characters are often successful with. In Call Me By Your Name (2007), his blockbuster debut novel, a 17-year-old Elio naturally infers that his six-week romance –though ardent and all-consuming by every measure – with an older house guest, Oliver, may not matter a few months ahead. Except, years after Oliver has returned to the States and even married someone else (a woman), the image of an unlived life still beckons to Elio like a “vision of fireflies on a summer field toward evening that keeps saying, you could have had this instead.”

For Aciman, setting things right was not a case of if but when. In the sequel that followed twelve years later, Find Me (2019), Oliver imagines confessing to his wife that he has long felt akin to “the severed tail of a lizard that flays and lashes about, while the body’s stayed behind all the way across...

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