The New York Times-bestselling author of Find Me and Call Me by
Your Name returns to the essay form with his collection of thoughts on
time, the creative mind, and great lives and works.
Irrealis moods are a category of verbal moods that indicate that
certain events have not happened, may never happen, or should or must
or are indeed desired to happen, but for which there is no indication
that they will ever happen. Irrealis moods are also known as
counterfactual moods and include the conditional, the subjunctive, the
optative, and the imperative--all best expressed in this book as the
might-be and the might-have-been.
One of the great prose stylists of his generation, André Aciman returns
to the essay form in Homo Irrealis to explore what time means to
artists who cannot grasp life in the present. Irrealis moods are not
about the present or the past or the future; they are about what might
have been but never was but could in theory still happen. From
meditations on subway poetry and the temporal resonances of an empty
Italian street to considerations of the lives and work of Sigmund Freud,
C. P. Cavafy, W. G. Sebald, John Sloan, Éric Rohmer, Marcel Proust, and
Fernando Pessoa and portraits of cities such as Alexandria and St.
Petersburg, Homo Irrealis is a deep reflection on the imagination's
power to forge a zone outside of time's intractable hold.
