Liam Ostermann's Reviews > The Gentleman from Peru

(My apologies but I posted a version of this review before correcting it, so forgive the duplication. This is the proper review).

A group of university friends agree that in ten years, if one of them gets rich, they'll hire a yacht and all go on a fabulous holiday and low-and-behold in ten years it comes to pass and they sail around the Mediterranean, except for their host who can't come because he's too busy making money (not surprising when rent luxury yachts cost from $150,000+ per week). Then the yacht breaks down and they all settle in a luxury hotel on the Amalfi Coast of Italy, still on their friends tab.

As soon as I read this I was distracted by questions, did they make this agreement at graduation or before? Was ten years part of the agreement or was that just the amount of time it took for one of them to become obscenely rich? Who, unless they are already from yacht owning backgrounds, imagines, at 21, that in ten years they or any of their friends are going to be in a position to hire a yacht? Why, although they are now all 31+ do they still act, behave and talk like teenagers? Why are none of them married, with children? How many people ten years after graduation are still in regular touch with one, let alone ten friends from university?

Almost immediately this collection of friends encounter a mysterious older man, Raul, who proceeds to perform wonders, like curing one of a painful tennis shoulder, another is informed of a lost fortune that will enable him to leave his job, pay off his college debts and 'sail off with the young sailor who lent you his hat two nights ago' and finally warns he their absent host against a approaching financial catastrophe in time to save his fortune (and presumably bankroll his friends holiday).

Almost immediately I was distracted by memories of countless films, most of them old ones, involving groups of strangers meeting in a hotel like 'Halfway House' or 'The Man in the White Suit' or on boats in 'Between Two Worlds' but gradually realised this trope also covered films like 'Ten Little Indians' and those Amicus portmanteau 'D. Terror' horror films and probably every disaster movie ever made. Still I was intrigued to see what Aciman would make of it.

What he did was abandon it, the friends from a broken down yacht (I wonder if any of them wondered why only one of them was told how to become rich and sail off into the sunset? Did the one with the cured tennis shoulder see it as a paltry gift in comparison?) and the story concentrates on Raul sweeping one young lady off on a tour of his memories in which she is his first love who died at 22 in a car crash. Not the reincarnation, more a rebirth of this person, and sure enough as he whisks her about his family home she remembers who she was (who she currently is doesn't seem to matter).

Aciman devotes an inordinate amount of this novella's 169 pages with Raul, not explaining his powers, but explaining his philosophy '...the moment two individuals love each other for who each truly is then time for them stops, and if these two don't die together, then the partner who lives on never recovers, never forgets, and keeps waiting until they meet again in who knows how many lifetimes..." is one the laboriously wordy, but meaningless expositions we are treated to. Considering how short the book is they can't be that lengthy, but they do read as if they were interminable.

This was page 41 and how managed to make it through the next 120 pages (and they are small pages) is a bit of mystery because I hated every sentence - the whole book was a large dollop of over sweetened schmatz on top of sticky, rich pudding of cliches. There is actually something disturbing in Aciman's obsession as he gets older with first love being the great love story and vastly older men involved with women almost young enough to be their granddaughters (his excerable 2019 'Call Me' was full of the same themes. Interestingly 'The Gentleman from Peru' was first published as an audiobook in 2020 makes it, for me, a new edition, not a new work).

There are so many things about this story I loath, Raul who can dissolve kidney stones by touch and see the future but spends his time curing tennis shoulder and providing stock market tips for millionaires? In the near 40 years of his adult life is this the best he could do with such a gift? Did he ever think that maybe he had wasted his gift doing party tricks for the jeunesse dorée trash of wealthy seaside resorts?

Is love only possible when you are 20 with a full head of hair and a flat tummy and a private beach and coastal villa to wander about in lovely linen clothes? What if you are 20 and fat? Is love not possible? Is it only possible for Oscar and the young sailor to find love if they have money? Does love survive the 'pram in the hall' or is it only possible when there are nannies and boarding schools?

I really hated Raul and his true love through time with Margot/Maya and vapid, pretentious, but bogus pronouncements on life the universe and love. Only two groups of people think young love is forever or that losing it will kill you, the very young because they know no better; and the old because they want once to experience that 'Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven'.

This novella is appalling, it is an embarrassing, mastabatory fantasy trash of a geriatric who has abandoned any attempt at writing something worthwhile.