Eight White Nights

Marie Arana

…a collision of two eccentric souls that grows with mesmerizing intensity. This is a richly intellectual novel that will resemble nothing you've ever encountered. Despite its nods to Dostoyevsky and Rohmer, and for all the references to well-worn landmarks of a familiar city, it is an original to the core.
—The Washington Post

Publishers Weekly

This feverish novel from the author of Call Me by Your Name takes a microscope to a torrid romance–cum–battle of the sexes between two 20-something New Yorkers. Clara Brunschvicg and the unnamed narrator meet at a swank Christmas Eve party and immediately jockey for position. The ensuing grappling plays out over the course of the seven nights between that party and New Year's Eve. The motor that makes this dual character portrait hum is the narrator's uncertainty about sardonic beauty Clara's murky intentions. Aciman knows these types well, filling their romance with coffees, wealthy friends in Hudson County, and Rohmer film festivals, and he concocts ever more complex scenarios to dramatize the tension and uncertainty. This smart book is rich with the details of how skittish lovers interact. Aciman creates a private vernacular for the two while rarely failing to miss a telling smile or let so much as a line of dialogue go wasted. At times the narrator's wordiness drags—particularly when he intersperses the play-by-play of an intense moment with an extended analysis of the scene—but, mostly, the novel is taut and entirely authentic. (Feb.)

Kirkus Reviews

Luxurious, emotionally charged story of a love gone wrong-in about a week's time. The "white" of the title could refer to the wintry landscape, or to the blazing lights of Manhattan, or perhaps to the learned, tormented crowd in which Aciman's intellectually inclined protagonist moves, a tribe of people with names such as Muffy and Hans. "I am Clara," one fellow dinner partier announces behind the Christmas tree, which prompts Dostoyevskian inquiries on our narrator's part, yielding the apercu that "strained, indifferent, weary, and amused . . . it slipped between us like a meaningless formality that had to be gotten over with." Meaningless formalities turn into catty exchanges that border on the cruel, then into elective affinities and tender mercies, as our narrator finds himself swept up in a falling-in-love vortex that could go psychotic at any minute but thankfully does not. Aciman (Call Me By Your Name, 2007, etc.) is a poet of the sensitive bystander-not arch like Salinger, combative like Cheever or fraught like Updike, but occasionally stepping into their territories. When his characters say they're confused, they're confused-and when they say they love each other, well, the possibilities for misunderstanding are legion. Amid the "tuna-avocado miniature rolls . . . [and] seared scallop with a sprig of mache on a bed of slithered turnips with tamarind jelly," out zipping along on the Henry Hudson and the Taconic State Parkway, strolling up on the Upper East Side, his characters talk and act like real people, if real educated and well-heeled people, do. That is to say, they miss each other's signals with fateful regularity, caught up in their own tangles, but occasionally stealingkisses that taste "of bread and Viennese butter cookies" while hatching plans that never quite play out the way they're planned. In the end, it seems, every relationship is doomed to failure thanks to a surfeit of baggage-not that we shouldn't try all the same. A mature (though not in the R-rated sense) view of adult love-smart, carefully written and always fluent.

From the Publisher

"This is a richly intellectual novel that will resemble nothing you've ever encountered." —-The Washington Post