A Travel Guide for Time-Travel Tourists

Reading André Aciman's "The Gentleman from Peru" set on the Amalfi Coast.

Although set on the Amalfi Coast, somehow I completely missed André Aciman’s novella The Gentleman from Peru when it was first released as an Audible Original in 2020. The new print edition, published by Faber earlier this year, recently caught my eye. And what an eye-catching cover! With that alluring photograph by Kerry Wheeler of the La Scogliera beach club in Positano, how could I resist?

- Vintage postcard of Positano from 1964 showing Spiaggia Grande before La Scogliera was created.

The novel is set in a luxury hotel along the Amalfi Coast, perhaps inspired in part by the Le Sirenuse hotel as the book is dedicated to the owners Antonio and Carla Sersale. Yet, if it’s Positano, it’s a dream Positano. The setting is vivid and warm, very much the Amalfi Coast, but a dreamlike version where time seems to have stopped. A group of young American friends find themselves stranded due to boat issues in this glorious place and in a hotel where we only ever meet one other guest: Raúl, a particularly captivating gentleman from Peru.

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As the friends revel in the summer beauty of the sea and coastline, Raúl makes an unexpected connection with Margot, one of the young Americans. Shakespearean references abound: The Tempest, the poem The Phoenix and the Turtle, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The seemingly chance connection with Raúl creates a place where “spaces open up, errors are repaired, destinies untangled, and everything can be redressed. … Something good is bound to occur.” And that it does.

- Postcard from the 1960s of Marina di Praia beach in Praiano.

But here’s the thing. I want to tell you about this book but I don’t want to tell you anything about it. Not just spoilers, I mean, but anything. It’s a little gem that is better if you don’t know exactly how many facets it has - or even what kind of gem it really is.

Here’s what I can tell you instead:

Tucked into bed a few nights ago, I started reading the book and by the end of the first chapter found myself transported back to another night, 21 years ago, reading Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel García Márquez aloud as Tropical Storm Isabel blew through Washington, DC. I could tell you a lot of things about that night, as the wind battered the long panel of glass windows in an old high rise apartment building, but I couldn't tell you the reason for such an ominous book choice.

I also can’t explain the connection and why that book came back to me, but there is very much that same spirit of magical realism in Aciman's novella. Perhaps that's what carried me back to that night and to what feels now like a long ago “shadow self,” as Aciman's gentleman puts it. As I turned the pages, the story felt more and more like the chronicle of a love foretold. A love to last a great many lifetimes—no matter the shape—to come. Raúl says, "You see, it's life that is provisional, not love."

- Vintage postcard of Fornillo beach in Positano.

As Raúl becomes what Margot calls “a travel guide for time-travel tourists,” the story and the place unravel as under a spell. The novel has everything I love about reading a short story, especially that feeling of a finding a fully developed world that you as a reader just happen across. Turn a page and there it is.

I like to think of traveling somewhat the same. You go on holiday to a place and, even if you stop long enough to really look around, most of the time you only ever get a glimpse. After you leave, life carries on—if we’ve traveled carefully—without ever knowing we were there or gone. But the times when it doesn’t, well those are often the best stories, aren’t they?

Without telling you more, I’ll say do read The Gentleman from Peru. While the beauty of the Amalfi Coast is deeply present in the story, don’t read it to be transported to the Amalfi Coast. Read it to be transported to other versions of yourself, the ones perhaps best found while traveling. 

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PS: I picked these postcards from the 1960s from my collection to include here because they reminded me of Raúl’s simpler and quieter Amalfi Coast from his youth:

“As an adolescent I used to come here to be alone. Like being on another planet and stepping totally out of time. A wonderful feeling of pure quiet and pure being at one with the world.”

As a little surprise, I turned over the postcard of the Spiaggia Grande (the first one above) and noticed it was stamped from the Albergo “Le Sirenuse” Positano in October 1964. Travel memories from a bygone day still floating around out there in the world!

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