Word: acimanã
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...plot is unabashedly gimmicky, clashing with Aciman??s rhythmic and ornamented sentences. “Eight White Nights” opens with a (heavily repeated) hook—“I am Clara”—with which the main love interest introduces herself. It then breaks into an eight-part narrative, in which each part chronicles a different night that the unnamed narrator spends with Clara. He meets her while lurking behind the tree at a Christmas party and is instantly and fatally drawn towards her. Smart and mean, Clara scintillates with brilliance...
...mentally ward it off at all costs; for the narrator, it is simply a question of “lying low” and warding off the cruelty of lovers. Yet the protagonist and Clara, caught in their self-involved and unspectacular web of emotions, are too banal for Aciman??s trick to work, and the protagonist’s dense, slogging thoughts form a thicket of angst that paralyses the narrative. He despairingly thinks, “It occurred to me that rehearsing loss to dull the loss might bring about the very loss I was hoping...
...only dynamic motif in “Eight White Nights” is the coded language that the lovers invent in order to communicate with each other. One of Aciman??s more inspired devices, it infuses the relationship between Clara and the protagonist with the warmth and poignancy of two kindred spirits attempting to invent a hermetic universe for themselves. They invent the terms “otherpeoples” and “Shukoffs” in their very first conversation, referring to the mass of boring, unimaginative humans who surround them. Their conversation continues, full...
...Aciman??s shower of allusions is too perfunctory to do justice to the ideas and places he is evoking. The nod to a different cultural context is shallow, but additionally becomes disturbing when Aciman uses metaphors reminiscent of the pain and trauma caused by World War II to describe the main character’s somewhat unconvincing anguish at Clara’s rejection. He morosely declares, “I’ll always hate you for this, for bringing me to the abyss and forcing me to stare down, the way they force a detainee...
...Aciman??s effort in “Eight White Nights” to imitate Proust and constantly dwell within thoughts, metaphors, code-phrases, and imagined scenes of passion is misguided. The prose is feverish and obsessive; though his writing occasionally reaches lyrical heights, the banality of his subjects often overpowers. It particularly raises the question of whether the flowery, (pand)angsty voice of the narrator isn’t just Aciman??s projection of how he believes women want men to think, feel and obsess over them, since there doesn’t appear...