📕Happy #Pubday to this series of essays which are bunch of love letters to Alexandria, Paris, New York and all memories that comes with them. Love letters to all shoulda, woulda and couldas
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📗Aciman takes you to his childhood and opens you up the times that he wouldn’t think that exists. He takes you from cinema to cinema to show you different films where he reflects on different moods (or as he calls irrealis moods) that might or might not happened in his real life
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📘Some essays left me thinking did I understand what actually happened here while some others made perfect sense. Based on your mood and level of imagination that you can incorporate into these essays change how much you’ll enjoy it. I’d say give it shot; you might find something that sticks with you

Andre's style of writing is really some of the most beautiful I have ever read. He truly just has a magical way with words and how he describes things. He knows how to make you feel wherever he is, whether physical or mental. i didn't love all these essays, some I found myself getting lost a bit, but overall this was a great read. I especially loved all the essays set in Rome, as it is one of my favorite places in the world and he describes it so well. Thank you to Netgalley and Farrar, Straus and Giroux for the ARC.

Thank you to NetGalley and Farrar, Straus and Giroux for allowing me to read this book.

Homo Irrealis is a collection of essays written by André Irrealis. These essays are surrounded by the irrealis moods “a certain situation or action is not known to have happened at the moment the speaker is talking”. In this collection, Aciman explores the themes of time and the hypothetical situation in which everything exists and does not all together regardless of what happens and did happen.

Throughout this collection, the theme of exile emerges from the mind of Aciman regardless of what topic the author focuses on. There seems to be a place in which the author is stuck between the realities or perhaps yearning for a reality that has never happened or might have happened. This resembles being an exile, immigrant, and migrant; being stuck between worlds yearning for the past but also the future. Nostalgia is a major part of a migrant’s identity: the inexplainable yearning for a home and past, that is no longer available to the exile: “Perhaps I wanted the scene to exist outside of time, with no real indication of where, when, or in which decade the picture was taken”. It is not longing for that specific period of time, country, or place, it merely is longing for something that does not exist within time or space.

Moving from place to place forms an identity that no longer belongs to the person. There is not just one identity anymore but multiple ones serving for adaptability. Now in that subject, alienation comes to mind to explain why one person seeks another identity or a new country. It has multiple answers but in a general sense the difficulties of a providing better opportunities for certain living style pushes its citizen out or those people are pushed out of their country in horrible circumstances. As it is in case here, André Aciman did not feel welcomed in Egypt due to his family being Sephardic Jews. Therefore, once being alienated it is easy to fantasise for a new reality, that may or may not be real. It is explained so well by Aciman in this quotation:

"But once in France I soon realized that France was not the friendly and welcoming France I had dreamed of in Egypt. That particular France had been, after all, merely a myth that allowed us to live with the loss of Egypt. Yet, three years later, once I left France and moved to the Unites States, the old, imagined, dreamed-of France suddenly rose up from its ashes, and nowadays, as an American citizen living in New York, I look back and catch myself longing once more for a France that never existed and couldn’t exist but is still out there, somewhere in the transit between Alexandria and Paris and New York, though I can’t quite put my finger on its location, because it has no location. It is a fantasy France, and fantasies—anticipated, imagined, or remembered—don’t necessarily disappear simply because they are unreal."

Homo Irrealis had a personal touch for me as I have had similar experiences of being in a transcendental position, being in between two worlds. Yearning for a home or the past life, that is never existent in reality as we know it. But it exist beyond our mind and time, it stands still in a place, where we can only reach in our mind. When you leave a place, it will never be the same when you get back to it. Just like it is for Giovanni in Giovanni’s Room and Raif Efendi in Madonna in a Fur Coat: they yearn for the past but also the future in present time but they only exist in their minds.

The author writes in a beautiful lyrical style. tithe essays need to br read slowly to absorb all the thoughts in them.A book that stays with you even after the last pages.#netgalley#fsg

Decent story, easy enough to follow. I would read more books by this author. Overall, I liked the characters, the plot, the dialogue, and the wrap up.

3/5 Stars

I like Aciman's books ALMOST as much as I like this collection of short essays, in which the author describes some cities (including Rome and Alexandria), the director Rohmer and other famous poets and books, which gave me the opportunity to extend my already endless list of books to read.
Unfortunately, in some cases, I found the chapters a bit repetitive, so I recommend not reading the whole book in a row.

I libri di Aciman mi piacciono quasi quanto questa raccolta di brevi saggi, in cui l'autore descrive alcune cittá (tra cui Roma e Alessandria), il regista Rohmer e altri poeti e libri famosi, che mi hanno dato l'opportunitá di allungare la mia giá infinita lista di libri da leggere.
Purtroppo peró in alcuni casi, ho trovato i capitoli un po' ripetitivi e quindi consiglio di non leggere il libro tutto di seguito.

Andre Aciman has a beautiful, vulnerable, and poetic voice, and everything I've ever read from them has been gorgeous. This is no exception. That being said, these essays are quite dense, and I would recommend buying this with the intention to take your time to read them. One at a time, in order to reflect on our understanding of time, when you're feeling meditative.

This collection of essays by André Aciman is highly intriguing that I spent my entire weekend digesting his thoughts of the irrealis form of thinking that most of us possess, and sometimes we express unconsciously.

In linguistics, “irrealis” moods are the set of grammatical moods that indicate that something is not actually the case or that a certain situation or action is not known to have happened at the moment the speaker is talking. (Loc. 45)


What the author transcribes as irrealis is how we often think in the form of “what should we have done” and the kind of longing for the alternate universe that might accompany us were we put that choice up instead of the choice that we finally ended up making. There are many ways irrealis moods could influence us, and it’s the author’s gift for having lived in various places around the globe, reading many classical books, as well as watching countless films that enable this thought to transpire in him. It all begins in his quest of searching for the real Alexandria, the place which rejected him due to his Jewish heritage, and the fact that he longed for that Alexandria which never was by the time he moved to Rome.

The irrealis mood knows no boundaries between what is and what isn’t, between what happened and what won’t. In more ways than one, the essays about the artists, writers, and great minds gathered in this volume may have nothing to do with who I am, or who they were, and my reading of them may be entirely erroneous. But I misread them the better to read myself. (Loc. 130)


From the start of the volume, the author has warned the readers about the implications of reading through the lens of irrealis mood. What we call reality, experience, or senses, they might as well disappear in face of the irrealis mood. And there’s no better way to get in touch with irrealis mood besides facing it inside works of art. In this volume besides from his own personal experiences, the author also provides us to the irrealis mood that he "thinks” present inside Freud’s sojourn to Rome, three French New Wave films directed by Eric Rohmer (My Night at Maud’s, Claire’s Knee and Chloe in the Afternoon), paintings by the Impressionists, as well as Proust’s novel. His reading through those works never failed to impress me on how the irrealis mood is pretty much present in many art forms.

By the time I reached the last essay, it gives me an impression that we as humans have never truly lived in the present. There are many ways we reject reality by thinking of “what could possibly happen if…” and present ourselves with so many alternative cases. And that’s why we ended up inventing words such as 'remorse' and 'regret' to cope up with the daunting irrealis mood. Much more so, André Aciman uses many of his personal experiences that seem at times coherent with my own in the way that I interpret them as so. Perhaps we all have become slaves to probability.

This volume will be really engaging if you are a fan of art and literary essays, and have a general understanding of New Wave French cinema which occupies almost half of the volume. Through this volume, the author takes me into a journey to see that our lives might have been guided through so many random occurrences and serendipities more than what we realise.

i don't know how i feel about this. some of the essays made me feel stupid, but andré aciman's style is very pretty. i enjoyed reading it even if i barely understood anything.