Monday, March 05, 2007
Clementizing
Just a very brief heads-up that tomorrow (today, most likely, by the time you're reading this?) there's an event at the New York Public Library that promises to be truly exceptional: it's Tuesday, March 6 at 7pm and the occasion is a conversation between Andre Aciman and Colm Toibin on landscapes of eros and loss. I wish I could go, but an evening out is going to drive me over the brink into complete insanity--I read Aciman's novel on the train to/from Philadelphia on Saturday and it is a work of extraordinary beauty and great genius, I'd hoped to write a proper post about it this evening but it can be said that after an impossibly long day I must just write one little letter of recommendation, if I can possibly steel myself to the job, and then try and get some sleep. But I announce with confidence that you had better get yourself a copy of Call Me By Your Name and read it ASAP, and tomorrow I will tell you why that is so (I am going to have decadent midday blogging and be damned to all the work that's awaiting my attention--it was an amazing relief reading the book on Saturday, for that matter, something in me has just been calling out for a good novel, I find fiction necessary for life on earth and have not had enough of it recently at all!).
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Am very, very flattered by the post, not just becasue you have the nicest things to say about my book, but because, unlike everyone else who has written about it, you've hit on the key word: Clementizing. Thank you so much.
ReplyDeleteI'm certainly determined to read this book eventually, but will you please release me from my agony and explain 'clementizing'? I must be particularly dense, but I cannot figure out what you mean - sure not a clementine? or clement? or??
ReplyDeleteOr do you mean Clement's The Tutor , though I suppose this is rather far-fetched?
ReplyDeleteNo big deal this time since Saturday was crazy at our house, but next time you come to Philly you let me know, okay?
ReplyDeleteO.K., here goes re: Clementizing.
ReplyDeleteI made up the word, but it comes from a discussion in my book about the Basilica of San Clemente in Rome. (I’m more or less going to quote from Call Me by Your Name) “The Basilica of S.C. is built on the site of what once was a refuge for persecuted Christians. This refuge was burnt down during Emperor Nero’s reign. Next to it, the Romans built an underground pagan temple dedicated to Mithras, over whose temple the early Christians built another church, on top of which came yet another church that burnt down and on the site of which stands today’s basilica. And the digging could go on and on. Like the subconscious, like love, like memory, like time itself, like every single one of us, the church is built on the ruins of subsequent restorations, there is no rock bottom, there is no first anything, no last anything, just layers and secret passageways and interlocking chambers, like the Catacombs…”
To Clementize is to find more than one layer when most of us are perfectly happy to live with just one. Since this is a novel about (among other things) sexuality, the idea is that “we are not written for one instrument alone.”
Andre, thanks. Of course this makes me more determined than ever to read the novel.
ReplyDeleteBTW Jenny, as much as I've been enjoying Toibin's Mothers and Sons, I'm very skeptical about these public 'conversations' - do they really bring anything except publicity? Personally, I'd rather read the fiction, or perhaps an essay on the subject. But then, I'm with Coetzee on the matter of authors performing in public, and that improvisation is the province of jazz musicians, not writers.
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