This is by Egyptian-born American author Andre Aciman, and it was published earlier this year.

Reason for reading? Purely because it was there in Douglas Library on the "NEW" shelf...

But it turned out to be very timely, because it brilliantly captures HEAT -- the kind of thing so many in the northern hemisphere are dealing with at the moment.

Here's a passage from the first page: "A typical midweek summer evening in Manhattan, when nothing, not cold showers, not cold drinks, not a desultory, long stroll through the chilly aisles of an all-night drug-store, could undo the heat's hold on the city. July weather. The will sags, sloth sets in, the mind nods and nothing gets done..."




You don't want to be in the city in the summer. You want to be on the Isle of Man...

***

The premise of this novella is simple. You find out that someone who is now dead loved you, and never told you...

Let's put some names to that scenario. Julian, married to Dennis, finds out from a woman called Carol that Paul Axel (who committed suicide) was in love with him for years.

And let's add some extra info. Paul is married to someone called Connie, and has a daughter called Anna Livia. He wrote extensive diaries, which he instructed Carol and Anna Livia to entrust to the New York Public Library. He also instructed Carol to contact Julian, and tell him all.

Carol, also married, had a brief fling with Paul many years ago, and the two remained good friends. But there's a kind of might-have-been ache about that relationship. Carol learns from the diary that the first kiss she and Paul shared was hugely important for him. It "ground his life to a halt". He never stopped being in love with her.

Julian knows Paul, but on a very casual, say-hello-in-the-coffee-shop basis. He was sometimes invited to events at the magazine Paul headed up, but never read anything into that. Nor (oddly, in my view) was he alerted by Paul's apparently casual gift of a bow tie... The fact that he didn't tell Dennis about this unusual present perhaps suggests that he subconsciously realized that something more was going on than met the eye. But the thought never crystallized in his conscious levels of thinking. Carol certainly has a good grasp of the significance of the gift: "For a man as withdrawn and so self-effacing as he was, have you any idea what it meant for him to buy you a necktie...?" But no, Julian didn't. How could he have done?

Don't be misled, by the way, by comments linking Stowaways to Noel Coward's Still Life (or Brief Encounter, as it was later named). I was intrigued enough by reviewers' references to read the script of the play, and apart from a relationship that doesn't go anywhere, these works have absolutely NOTHING in common...

So, it's a really good scenario.

On the one hand, you feel it's kind of unfair to arrange for such information to burst into some unknowing person's life -- now that it's too late to do anything about it, even if he wanted to. It's the perfect recipe for sparking self-reproach in anyone with half a heart. And although Carol insists Paul wasn't a stalker, the fact that he wrote these very detailed descriptions of his fleeting encounters with Julian (he was a very careful observer), and then asked for it all to be shared with the object of his gaze, does feel a little creepy to me.

On the other hand, you also feel terribly sorry for this outwardly successful but inwardly buttoned-down man, and the novel riffs very effectively on the themes of love, trust, and regret.

Paul certainly seems to live life at a distance: "We love those we cannot know. It's our first and last move. Intimacy, he used to say, is best with strangers. We're seldom who we are with those we know."



He's embarrassed to be turning up at the coffee shop on the off-chance he'll see Julian, and exchange with him some conversational trivialities. "He had figured out," says Carol, "at what time you were likely to stop at Starbucks in the morning and made a point of bumping into you there, not too frequently at first, because he didn't want you to know -- or, as always with our dear Paul, he wavered between hoping you'd know and dreading you might."

And nothing came of it, any more than anything had "come" of his relationship with Carol: "He scanned his life, the years before and those after, and they looked so hollow, so wasted. Just love away, he told himself, and smuggle the whole thing under your pillow, your blanket, your lonely life."

Paul did indeed once talk to Carol about "contraband love". Contraband is something secret, illegitimate, to be hidden away, and carried about under wraps. "In the end," she says, "not trusting became his default setting."

But she insists that Paul had tuned out emotionally a very long time ago: "By the time he fell for you he was already a damaged soul. He knew he was damaged. And for that he had no one to blame but me... I killed something in him. Passion? Trust? Vigour? Fun? Who'll ever know. After me, he shut down... He was as good as dead already but plodded on... Someone robbed his soul and that someone was me... But you, when you came on the scene, were his last hope. I was his first, you his last. Whoever came in between didn't matter."


Petrified heart...

Julian is moved by the dead man's predicament, and certainly understands that it was very difficult for gay or bi men of Paul's generation. What they felt "was routinely disowned, ignored, withheld and never taken seriously".

He continues, explaining the title in the process: "If I am right... everything he touched felt wrong, was wrong. In the end, all he did was think of what he never had till he was left with nothing... His whole life needed to be done over, and for that he needed time, and time had run out. Paul, the man who may never have been himself, the man who lived the wrong life and who can't buy himself back; Paul was the shadow of someone who never was, a stowaway in his own ship. He lived the wrong life, with you and with me and everyone he slept with, male and female..."

This is a lot to draw from just Carol's testimony... He hasn't even read the diaries yet...

But anyway... Reflecting on their conversation later, Carol surmises: "One becomes a stowaway when there's nothing left to look forward to and all one does then is look back and question everything."

And the book closes with Carol imagining how Julian might share the day's news with Dennis: "Yes, for five long years, who'd have guessed, a stowaway in his own ship, poor guy... Some rush to speak their heart, others stand and wait. I didn't wait, says Dennis. I didn't either, says Julian. We're lucky. Well, we are lucky, very lucky. Not stowaways, then? Never stowaways."

Which sounds a little complacent, and maybe Julian and Dennis would have been much more sensitive. But the moral of the story is exactly that: Don't be an emotional stowaway... Because one way or another, we will all die, and it will be too late to fix anything. Maybe this was Paul's lesson, Carol muses: "One dies a piece at a time, till there's no time, and no one to show us the exit -- we die alone. He died alone."


I'm not a fan of this cover design...

***

In all, it's a thought-provoking and moving story.

But I had three caveats:

Firstly, although I appreciated what the novel had to say about lost chances, I felt the reflections were sometimes pushed just that bit too far over the border into sentimentalism.

Secondly, I'm not sure the vehicle of an extended conversation was the best way to present the dilemma. The dialogue often sounded somewhat forced -- the kind of thing you'd write, but not say. That tendency was already apparent in the bit about stowaways that I quoted above. Here's another example of Julian's extemporization: "I think he was in love, but his mind and his heart were never aligned. Something was always off, as if you and I were two stops on an endless train ride whose last station, as far as he knew, hadn't been built yet." All this sounds very far from what would happen in a natural conversation, and I often found the discrepancy jarring.

Thirdly, here, as in so many other books, I found myself disliking what comes across as pretentiousness. Maybe I'm just an inverted snob, but seriously... Here's the recollection of Carol's early days with Paul: "The best was when they'd go together to their college library every night, first to translate Animal Farm into ancient Greek and then to read Dante together." Maybe my university experience was sub-standard, but I knew NOBODY who did this kind of thing... Another time, Carol tells Julian: "We'd head to a bar to order Irish coffees or black Russians, I can't remember which..." You can't remember, and yet you insist on the detail...

***



Still, these quibbles notwithstanding, I would go another round with Aciman, because he writes about serious stuff, and the language is often very beautiful. Here's Paul, in his diary, on death (which he opted for, remember): "Death is a long, long void, far larger than the sum total of all the constellations in the universe lying trillions of light years away, where even God isn't waiting at the end of the road, because there is no end to that road. Death is everlasting and, even after the universe is swallowed up and rolled up into a tiny speck, death will outlast that speck."

Carpe diem, people. Carpe diem.