Lie With Me: 'Stunning and heart-gripping' André Aciman

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The reader never really gets to know Thomas, but this is likely by design — the young man is something of an enigma to Philippe as well, despite the boy's best efforts to get him to bare his soul. Besson renders Philippe beautifully, though, giving the boy a real sense of self-awareness, which turns into something harsher when he becomes an adult, sneering at his younger self as "an easy-going idiot" and thinking, "Today, I'd like to slap this seventeen-year-old kid, not because of the good grades but because of his incessant need to please those who would judge him." What did you think of the way the author played with truth and fiction? Does the book change if you know that it’s a memoir rather than a novel? My father insisted on good grades. I simply didn’t have the right to be mediocre or even average. There was only one place for me—first. He claimed that I would find salvation in my studies, that only study could “allow one to enter the elevator.” He wanted the top-ranking higher education establishments for me, nothing else. I obeyed, just as I had with my glasses. I had to. Moving ... Besson's writing and Ringwald's smooth translation provide emotional impact. Publishers Weekly

I don’t ask him if he also has his mother’s fragility, even though I’ve been dying to ask ever since he told me that his sister has their father’s strength. He would refuse to answer the question anyway because it’s too intimate. It would require a confession on his part, or at least introspection. But I’m convinced that the fineness of his frame comes from her, and his nonchalance too. We leave the gym as we came in, sneaking ourselves through the window, and return to the biting cold of winter outside.

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It was a carnival, one that happened every year during Easter on the Place du Château. There were rides, a carousel with wooden horses, bumper cars; a rifle-shooting game with pink and blue stuffed toys to win; a slide; slot machines; a punching ball to measure your strength; candy stands; the scent of cotton candy and waffles; alcoholic drinks for the grown-ups; a carnie, hidden from sight, who didn’t stop barking into a microphone; and the music too loud, all the time. There were no clowns or magicians, no doubt they were too expensive for a town like Barbezieux. Sometimes he lets them approach. I’ve already seen him with a select few, usually the pretty ones. Immediately I feel a fleeting stab of jealousy, a sense of impotence. It’s a way to go straight to the point, to show him the same candor he has shown me. It’s also a way to validate everything else, everything that’s been said, to get rid of it. To say: I understand, everything is fine, it’s fine with me. I feel the same. Truly stunning & original & rare. One of the most odious & compelling & fascinating narrator's ever.” - Claire Kendal, author of THE BOOK OF YOU In later years, I will often write about the unthinkable, the element of unpredictability that determines outcomes. And game-changing encounters, the unexpected juxtapositions that can shift the course of a life.

I can imagine everything. And I don’t deprive myself of doing so. On certain days, T.A. is a bohemian child from a family sympathetic to the May ’68 riots. On other days, he’s the wanton son of a bourgeois couple, as the children of uptight parents often are. Sometimes it happens by the sea. When the beach grows empty, at nightfall. After the children’s summer camps have gone. All over the sands a shriek goes up, saying that Capri is over. It was the city of our early love, but now it’s over. Over. I discovered the cinema four years earlier when we first moved to Barbezieux from the village where we lived above the school with the linden trees. It was a small theater, with only a few seats, but to a child from the village, a boy who had to go to bed at eight thirty every night regardless of his pleas and ploys, a boy who had never in his life seen a film before, it was a new world. I’m the youngest of my family. My brother is pursuing advanced studies and will soon write his thesis and become a doctor of mathematics, publishing articles in international journals that are inaccessible to laymen and attending conferences around the world. Imagine what it was like growing up after him. As good a student as I was, unfavorable comparisons were made regularly. It’s why, I explain to Thomas, the destiny he envisions for me can be considered only second-rate compared to the one that awaits my older brother. He assures me that I’m wrong. Even now I remain fascinated by this sentence. Understand, it isn’t the premonition that fascinates me, nor even the fact that it has been realized. It’s also not the maturity or poignancy implied. It’s not the arrangement of the words, even if I’m aware that I probably wouldn’t have been able to come up with those exact ones myself. It’s the violence that the words carry within them, their admission of inferiority and, at the same time, of love.I have no idea that one day I will write books. It’s an inconceivable hypothesis. If by some extraordinary chance the idea happened to cross my mind, I would have chased it away. The son of a school principal, an imposter? If I had not been abandoned by my friends, if he had failed to convince his to leave him behind, this moment would not have taken place. It could have almost never happened. You can see it in the bare branches of a tree you would think was dead planted there in the middle of the courtyard, and in the frost on the windows, and in the steam escaping from mouths and the hands rubbing together for warmth. I remember the movement of his hips pressing against the pinball machine. This one sentence had me in its grip until the end. Two young men find each other, always fearing that life itself might be the villain standing in their way. A stunning and heart-gripping tale.” —André Aciman, author of Call Me by Your Name

He says: Because you are not like all the others, because I don’t see anyone but you and you don’t even realize it. Yes. One day it will happen, one day you’ll miss horribly what you described as “unbearable”—what we tried to do, you and I, in the summer of 1980, that summer of wind and rain. Nathalie is a year and a half younger than he is. It made sense for a second child to be born so soon after the first one, but he says she doesn’t look anything like him. She takes after their father. She has his light eyes, his strength. To escape this feeling of being excommunicated, I reason with myself: perhaps he was simply disappointed, I didn’t live up to what he had imagined. I keep telling myself that despite the evidence, it can be fixed, I can make it up to him. I’m already hoping to be able to beg for another chance. I hang on to the possibility of redemption. I don’t know at the time that the writer Hervé Guibert will become an important writer for me. Six months later, I will discover The Remarkable Adventures and the passage about the desire to merge with his lover will annihilate me.I try to figure out the part that chance played, to assess the nature of the risk that led to the encounter, but I don’t succeed. We are in the land of the unthinkable. (Later he will tell me that he waited for the right moment to approach me but until that morning it had never arisen.) Le prix Maison de la presse révèle sa sélection finale 2017". Livres Hebdo (in French) . Retrieved 10 September 2023.