Eight White Nights by André Aciman

Eight White Nights Reviews

• 
  snowplum

  If you love music and sympathize with introspective and intelligent characters who think as much as they act (and often might wish they could act more than their anxieties allow them to), this book is a gem. I've read critiques that find the characters unrealistic -- too elitist, they "think too much," they imbue all sorts of moments with too much significance, and they fixate on tiny details that "no one" would care about. All I can say is these reviewers are not Aciman's people. But make no mistake -- Aciman is writing about certain real people and he is writing them brilliantly. There is some stunning prose in this book and I saw every single location taking shape, felt the heat of every fire, the snow on my eyelashes, was right there in the car for the drives along the Hudson... I loved this slow, introspective, honest, melancholy, hopeful look at desire. Bravo, Mr. Aciman.
• 
  Cheryl

  Aciman is a Proust scholar so it's not surprising that this work is so Proustian: a narrative of the human experience that occurs through slow accumulation of thoughts, sensory information and psychological awakenings. I read somewhere (maybe in an interview) that Aciman considers this his favorite book. If you've read Proust simply to enjoy the journey of meanders, then you'll enjoy this read. If you've read Dostoyevsky's
  White Nights, you'll appreciate a similar love story and inner restlessness of character. And if you've read any of Aciman's works, well you'd simply enjoy the craftsmanship that is his style. Simply put, don't read this if what you seek is conventional story structure. Although I wanted another ending, this is my fourth Aciman read and, as always, I was stunned by how he uses language to illuminate human nature, to showcase the loneliness of a man who wanders the city remembering his father and thinking constantly about a woman he's just met.
  
  
  
  "Perhaps it was the state of a woman whose beauty could easily overwhelm you, but then, rather than withdraw after achieving its effect, simply lingered on your face and never let go till it read every good or bad thought it knew it would find and had probably placed there, straining the conversation, promising intimacy before its time, demanding intimacy as one demands surrender, breaking through the lines of casual conversation long before preliminary acts of friendship had been put in place, daring you to admit what she'd known all along: that you were easily flustered in her presence, that she was right, all men are ultimately more uneasy with desire than the women they desire."
  
  Hello New York City: Strauss Park, 105th Street. Hello love and anxiety and fear and pain and restlessness all wrapped in a bow that secures two bottles of champagne for a new year's toast and a trip to see Eric Rohmer's films. Aciman had to be in love when writing this. In fact I couldn't help remembering pieces of
  Alibis: Essays on Elsewhere as I read this. This is a story of a man and woman who get to know each other over the course of eight white nights. It embraces the angst of not knowing when or if you're in love and, better yet, if the other person feels the same. The book itself is in eight sections. The story occurs in dialogue and in stream. You either read yourself (or your Ex) in these elongated thoughts, or you try to clear a path free of convolutions. Maybe both. You read and you're a therapist. You read and you're a participant. You read and you're disoriented. You read this and you want to find a city whose maze you know how to maneuver because it is your city, the city you knew once you knew love, the city that holds those kind of memories you want to relive.
• 
  Dirk

  I finished this book on an airplane and I cried. I recall once years ago finishing something on an airplane and crying. It was John Barth's Chimera, and when the suit next to me looked at me oddly, all I could do was mumble, “It was so beautiful." So, to forestall committing a spoiler, I want say I did not cry because the end was unhappy or happy, but because it was so emotional for me. Which brings us to the characters. The book recounts the relations between a 20-something going on 14 couple from their meeting on Christmas Eve to New Years Eve in wintery New York mostly on the upper west side around 106th St. Like Aciman's previous novel, Call Me By Your Name, it is about the relation between passion and the development of a sense of self. They are intelligent and educated. Scattered literary and musical allusions are primarily important to the couple, but not to the reader, the reverse of the practice in some modernist novels, say, Ulysses. The connection with Dostoyevsky's story Four White Nights is a little complicated, and I can't explain it without spoilers, but I suggest you read it first. They travel in affluent circles if they are not affluent themselves. They are Jewish, passionate, and neurotic. More than once I thought of giving up in disgust at heir self-defeating maneuvers. You want shake them and say, 'Come on, get it on or get over it'. One thing that helped me hang with them was knowing that Aciman is a noted Proust scholar and recalling that the neurotic obsessions of Swann and Marcel are ultimately meaningful. The sketches of several minor characters are full-bodied and engaging, particularly of the POV's parents and of an old couple that serve as surrogate family to the heroine. The couple bond, among many other ways by mutually caricaturing other characters, except the parental figures, in a self-centered and even mean-spirited way as people trying to define themselves often do. The dialogue is terrific, some of it might have wandered in from Oscar Wild. They develop between them, not a special language, but, again as people defining themselves by love do, an important special vocabulary. I happen to have once lived in that neighborhood, and evocation of New York is intense and winning. The writing is terrific; particularly the POV's eloquent and insightful self regard, no matter how neurotic. No one wants to compare to Proust, but like Marcel this unwise young man squeezes out a lot of wisdom eloquently.
• 
  Kathy

  I loved the chemistry between the couple and most of the writing, but this really could've done with 200 pages less.
• 
  Heather Mays

  50 pages in and I thought, "Why am I wasting time reading this drivel?"
• 
  elise

  I have no idea what I just read.
• 
  Bob Garlitz

  for Goodreads
  
  Aciman, Our Apophatic Mystic
  
  Over the past few weeks I’ve been catching up on the work of André Aciman.  The great memoir and three of the novels.  Started a fourth, Eight White Nights, earlier this week. 
  
  I also found my new copy of Michael Sells book, Mystical Languages of Unsaying.  I had read some of the authors under discussion.  I had not realized that “The 150-year period from the mid-twelfth to the beginning of the fourteenth century constitutes the flowering of apophatic mysticism.  Almost simultaneously, the apophatic masterpieces of the Islamic, Jewish, and Christian traditions appeared . . . .” Such a short, intense cross cultural or intercultural period.  It made me wonder about apophatic forms of expression in our time.  I googled “apophatic novel” and up came, of course, the books by Charles Williams.  The Greater Trumps, Shadows of Ecstasy, War in Heaven, The Descent of the Dove.  I had read those years ago but had forgotten them.  I have long privately thought of Beckett’s works as explorations in negative theology.  I suppose there are many dissertations on the topic by now.  I would read Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet this way. 
  
  Day or so later I picked up a book of Aciman’s prose pieces.  A different voice in these than in the novels and it is the voice in the fictions that I love best.  But in the first few essays in False Papers I began to see how clearly Aciman is an apophatic writer.  “Exile” and “Memory” are in the subtitle and these words Aciman repeats endlessly in marvelously woven intricacies.  But it is desire, longing, that everything he talks about serves.  And look at these passages: 
  
  “It was my way of preempting tomorrow’s worries by making tomorrow seem yesterday, of warding off adversity by warding off happiness as well.  In the end, I learned not to enjoy going to Paris, or even to enjoy being there--because I enjoyed it too much.”
  
  “The Paris I cultivated was a Paris one need not stay too long in.  It was a Paris made to be yearned for and remembered, a Paris of the mind, a Paris which stood for the true life, the life done over, the better life, the one flooded in limelight, with tinsel, soundtrack, and costume.”
  
  “I had long ago learned to prefer the imagined encounter, or the memory of the imagined encounter, to the thing itself.”
  
  This is the basic pattern of all of Aciman’s writing---a saying and then an unsaying.  In Sell’s words “apophsis cannot help but posit . . . a ‘thing’ or ‘being,’ a being it must then unsay, while positing yet more entities that must be unsaid in turn.”  Aciman’s characters love and then lose and learn to unlove, whether a place like Alexandria or Paris, or a person, like Oliver who his love, Elio, asks to call him by his name.  Eight White Nights would be a great title for a mystical work, like The Cloud of Unknowing.  “what I was feeling was not just admiration . . . .  The word worship---as in ‘I could worship people like her’--hadn’t crossed my mind yet, though later that evening which I stood with her watching a glowing moonlight barge moored across the white Hudson I did turn to worship.  Because placid winterscapes lift up the soul and bring down our guard.  Because part of me was already venturing into an amorphous terrain in which a word here, a word there--any word, really---is all we have to hold on to before surrendering to a will far mightier than our own.”  (my emphasis)
  
  I suppose there are already many dissertations in a university libraries on the apophatic tradition in Modernist and Post-Modernist literature.   Aciman is certainly our principal practitioner at this moment.  Yearning oscillates between the poles of every bridge, every love, every utterance, every saying and unsaying.  Memory, exile, love and loss sustain this longing, as with every mystic. 
  
  posted Tuesday, February 7, 2017 on my blog chromenos.blogspot.com
  
  I sent this to Aciman and he gracioulsy replied a few days later: part of his reply follows:
  
  “I have been in print  for 20 years now and received some adulation, but never--i.e. NEVER--have  I felt that a reader understood me to the bone or so thoroughly as you did in your blog. You went straight to the soul of things--to use mystical language--because you got what I have elsewhere called the "soufflé" effect, the folding back and forth without necessarily arriving at any answer, a form of treading water, of floating but not swimming.  I can go on but it is the subject of what I hope will be a forthcoming collection of essays on various artists entitled Homo Irrealis, based on the irrealis mood, something that linguists call the indefinite mood in grammar.  Wikipedia has, I think, a damn good definition.
  
  In any event, your have inspired me to get Pessoa and see what he
  writes.  Thank you so much for ... well, thinking of me, thinking
  about me.
  André
• 
  Nancy

  How I loved this book. You have to have patience. It's eight days inside the head of a neurotic narrator as he falls in love with an equally neurotic woman and alternately draws her close and pushes her away because he doesn't believe in the possibility of love. It's very poetic, and very insular, and it probably helps to love New York if you want to read it. It's not for everyone, but for the right sort of reader it's a beautiful extended dream.
• 
  kasia

  Dawno nie sięgnęłam po powieść, która irytowałaby mnie od początku, do niemal samego końca, gdzie zaskakujące nie były momenty słabe, a te powiedzmy, całkiem niezłe (policzalne na palcach jednej dłoni). Lubię metafory (i te prostsze i te bardziej skomplikowane występujące w różnych układach i gwiazdozbiorach) ale tu było ich za dużo, wciskane na siłę, najciaśniejszymi zakamarkami wkradające się w każde zdanie. Rozczarowałam się przeokrutnie, nie ratowały tego nawet wspominane wieczory z Rohmerem, dialogi pretensjonalne, tak samo myśli głównego bohatera. Chciałabym dać więcej, ale naprawdę, naprawdę nie mogę.
• 
  Patty

  One of my worst reads in recent memory. No plot to speak of and characters were not particularly interesting or well-developed. Reading time was longer than "real time" in the story. Could not finish this one.
• 
  L.E. Chamberlin

  I know this isn't everyone's read. It just isn't. There's talking...so much talking. And there's a pathologically passive hero, and a heroine who is as much a fucked-up mess (if not more) than the hero, and a lot of in-the-weeds, nearly stream of consciousness dialogue and imagined dialogue. I can't even properly describe this book. I'm doing a terrible job of it. But it struck me in some strange, tender place and I trusted in
  André Aciman because he wrote one of my favorite books of all time,
  Call Me by Your Name.
  
  Nothing much happens - and yet, everything happens. Yes, it's one of those. But I loved it.
• 
  Azumi

  La historia empieza en Nochebuena, y durante 8 noches y sus días el protagonista nos narra en primera persona todo su proceso de enamoramiento, con sus dudas, miedos, deseos, juegos, inseguridades, etc. Pero lo que me ha parecido más interesante es que está contado desde el punto de vista de un hombre, y eso para mí ha sido todo un acierto.
  
  Además la prosa de André Aciman es preciosa y al igual que me pasó con "Llámame por tu nombre" me ha dejado encantada con sus palabras.
  
  Me lo quería leer en 8 días, un capítulo por día, una noche por día, pero no lo he conseguido :-(
  
• 
  theresa

  a miserable, convoluted read. shemay be clara but boy was i BORED.
• 
  Summer

  There are many thoughtful and beautifully written parts in this book, but it rambles on endlessly. I like Aciman’s general style, but this was too dense with overthinking and over-describing.
• 
  Jan

  Verbose, overblown, too full of itself. could have been an interesting story if it weren't smothered in descriptive "bobbing and weaving"
• 
  Agnieszka Kalus

  DNF
  Pretensjonalne dialogi.
  Sztuczne, nadęte, plastikowe postacie.
• 
  Eda Darpe

  typ det bästa jag har läst i år, den var helt underbar och perfekt. Skulle så väldigt gärna vilja rymma in i en Aciman-bok
• 
  Liina Haabu

  Eight White Nights is like a Woody Allen movie without the humour and jittery. It takes place in Manhattan in the days between Christmas and new year. At a Christmas party, a nameless narrator meets a girl named Clara and the eight following days they meet every day to go to the movies, eat, drink and mostly talk.
  
  It is a novel that I am sure many people will not enjoy as essentially nothing happens and the characters are super annoying. Aciman is a great fan of Rohmer movies and a Proust scholar and both of these influences show. It is to a great extent about the inner struggles that people face in the early stages of dating when they are treading carefully on unfamiliar territory. But here it is taken to a whole new level - the characters analyze everything to death and it becomes quite a bore. Especially as it does not seem to reach any conclusion but just keeps going in circles. It takes good writing to keep the reader interested in something like that for 360 pages.
  
  But here is where the good writing makes up for the rather weak plot. Manhattan in winter, Christmas and new year is such a magical setting and Aciman has captured this ambience that we are all so familiar with from movies. And despite exhausting the subject he does well getting us into the head of a man who is falling in love and scared, insecure, crazy happy and anxious at the same time.
  
  It is a very intellectual novel. I imagine most people not liking it and finding it incredibly boring and lagging but for those who find it right it is one of those rare treats that don't come across often.
• 
  Amanda

  I got this book as a goodreads first read. I figured it would be a great book seeing as others have raved over "Call Me by Your Name." I stated it the first night I got it. I cannot seem to get past the first night. This was my first romance novel and I completely disliked the book. I find a great annoyance to the character as he keeps obsessing over the girl he meets. He mentions her name a million times. Trying to convince himself of what "I am Clara" might mean. I handed it off to a friend in hopes that maybe he could give more perspective about the novel. I am sorry that I could not get past night one.
• 
  Linda

  This is a most annoying book. I guess it is supposed to be a steam of conciousness book, but the man is so limited in his thinking and the woman is strange to an exteme degree that it is almost not possible to continue reading the whole thing! There are a lot of very long sentences. I counted the words in one that was not even the longest and it had 179 words. That is just pretentious.
• 
  Kasia

  Czekałam, aż wróci mi zapał do tej książki, ale chyba się nie doczekam. Andre Aciman, zachwycił mnie tym z jaką lekkością pisał o nie łatwym uczuciu w książce ,,Tamte dni, tamte noce". Tutaj to już jest przerost formy nad treścią. Podobno druga połowa jest trochę lepsza, ale chyba nie mam ochoty tego sprawdzać ;/
• 
  Dawn

  "Has aparecido como una maldición en mi tierra, Clara, y mi sangre tardará generaciones en borrarte."
  
  'Ocho noches blancas', Belfast y esa ensoñación constante, ese anhelo constante.
• 
  Tracylea

  "Eight White Nights" was not the romance novel I anticipated from the title and the dust cover reviews.
  
  Having never read Aciman before his style seemed overreaching and confused during the first few pages of the story. I am pleased, however, that I stuck it out through that first difficult scene.
  
  "Eight White Nights" turned out to be a beautifully painful study of all the anticipation and wished for intimacy of a new relationship. The real and imagined conversations, twisted perceptions and angst is much like Milan Kundera. This reader will definitely be picking up more Andre Aciman novels.
  
  I received "Eight White Nights" through a Goodreads First Reads give away.
• 
  Bella Martinez

  Whoa. That was a whirlwind, and I don't know how to feel.
  
  First off, I know that this book isn't everyone's cup of tea. Not everyone wants to be trapped in the mind of a man whose thoughts move faster than a whirling dervish. But the beauty of Aciman's novel is that the protagonist thinks the same thoughts that everyone who has experienced love has thought, if maybe to a higher degree. There's pain and glee and heartbreak and beauty, all wrapped together, and trying to tease them apart does no good.
  
  The name Clara has forever been changed for me. Aciman's book was one of the most engaging things I've read in a long, long time.
• 
  Robert Wechsler

  A clever tale of a perverse little relationship that literally lasts through a snowy week. It’s a New York novel through and through, not only in terms of place, but also in terms of the characters’ neuroses. The male narrator is so frustratingly weak and obsessed, you want to hit him, and it is this that makes the novel so extraordinary. Without Aciman’s excellent writing, both sentences and structure, I can’t imagine it working.
  
• 
  Jay DeMoir

  A snooze fest. Could barely get through the first night. I was annoyed by the main character constantly "I am Clara" as if he was groot from guardians of the galaxy . It was was annoying by him overusing the phrase. Everything seemed to just drag.
• 
  Sophie

  I gave up even before the end of the first night.
  Very well-written but utterly boring and way too long. I really didn't care about the narrator or Clara.
  My first disappointment about an André Aciman's book.
• 
  Christy Stewart

  A bit too much rambling; and not the funny hobo kind. If the writing had been a little tighter the book could have effortlessly been 100 pages shorter.
  
  That's all I took away from it.