SINGAPORE – Fans of Andre Aciman’s Call Me By Your Name (2007) – which was made into a hit movie featuring actors Timothee Chalamet and Armie Hammer – will love the Italian-American writer’s newest novella.

Aciman returns to a triptych of obsessions in The Gentleman From Peru: summer, desire and Italy. A group of college friends are marooned at a lavish hotel on the Amalfi Coast and encounter a mysterious stranger who reveals his power of clairvoyance.

“Put it this way, it is not an accident that I frequently write about Italy,” says the 73-year-old over Zoom from his New York apartment, surrounded by three packed shelves of books in his background.

There is a sparkle in Aciman’s eye whenever he mentions Italy, where he wrote the book.

The writer’s short-lived adolescence spent in Rome is also the subject of a forthcoming romantic memoir, My Roman Year, set to be published at the end of 2024. He was born in Alexandria, Egypt, but his Jewish family left for Rome in 1965.

The award-winning writer says of the allure of Italy, a place of inspiration: “The moment it is summer, there’s a beach – there’s always a beach – and there’s this kind of warmth between human beings and something comes that disinhibits people, suddenly something else takes over.”

The maestro of desire on the page admits that he keeps excavating the same themes. “It’s almost like a trademark that I’m embarrassed by – there’s always a new model of the Chevrolet, but it’s the same idea. It doesn’t let go of me and I hope it never does.”

In The Gentleman From Peru, Aciman transforms love into an otherworldly passion, an inexplicable force which brings stranded strangers together unknowingly.

Like in his other books such as Enigma Variations (2017), Aciman continues to conjure that ineffable dimension of love that he is known for in his prose.

“I don’t like the love that is basically – ‘We get along, we have a friendship, we feel this, we feel that’ – I don’t like that. That is of no interest to me. I like something that is intense, maybe it doesn’t last a long time, but it is intense and utterly intimate to the point where you are obsessed and essentially unable to focus on anything else.”

He adds with a smile: “When that happens, it’s heaven.”

It is this passionate intensity which drew bibliophiles and cinephiles to the story at the centre of Call Me By Your Name’s summer romance – a slow-burn dance of gay longing between a young Elio and a visiting scholar Oliver. Their fling ignites buried feelings and unspoken desires.

“All love – the kind that I write about – is ultimately a bit destructive,” Aciman says. “It means that life as you are living it now is not as important as what we have between us.

“There’s nothing better than to wash your towels and your laundry on a Sunday afternoon with somebody that you love. This is lovely, but it’s not intense the way I like it to be – there’s something totally different.”

This destructive view of desire, Aciman finds, is no longer popularly held today as many people prefer a more rational view of love.

He says: “I find that most people, if I can say this, fight against desire, fight against their love. They try to minimise it so that they can harness it and live with it – and I think that’s what we all do, it’s healthy. But remember, on Sundays, you wash the laundry with that person – that’s not interesting.”

These rational lovers, he finds, prefer to keep their windows shut, “whereas connecting is a way of throwing open the shutters of the window”.

He adds: “I don’t know whether you have shutters in Singapore, but in New York, we don’t have shutters. In Italy, there are shutters – you fling them open and say to the world, ‘Let the sun shine on me.’”

But The Gentleman From Peru also moves Aciman into new territory as it is his first flirtation with the form of magic realism. “People said to me, ‘Oh, you’re incapable of writing anything magical.’ So I decided that I was going to show them.”

He, however, admits that none of the magic realists – not even the pioneer of the form, Colombian novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez – really stick with him as his sensibility is much more French and he is predisposed to psychological situations.

Aciman says: “I like small apartments with not many rooms. People are sitting down in the living room and chatting. There’s not much going on – they’re not sick, they’re not drugged out, they are not drunks – there’s nothing really extraordinary happening in their lives and it’s all internal. And I love that, I’ve always loved that.”

On the other hand, the intoxication of love has always carried a scent of magic. “There is something about love that is so magical. Love gives every appearance of transcending a lifetime.”

When asked if he would like for the book to be adapted into a movie, Aciman says he has heard that the 74-year-old actor Bill Nighy, who featured in the films Living (2022) and Love Actually (2003), has expressed interest in the role of the book’s titular gentleman Raul.

While nothing is confirmed, Aciman says: “I would love it. It’s a wonderful experience – and it’s lovely because a book public is always restrained. But you have a movie and everybody knows about it.”

His attitude towards film adaptations of his books is one of letting go. “I’ve said what I have to say, now it’s their turn to do whatever they want. I think Call Me By Your Name was very well done to the point where I said to the director (Luca Guadagnino) that the ending of the movie is better than the ending of the book.”

Asked if he is still learning about desire at his age, Aciman is effusive. “Always, always, always. You cannot plan desire, it has to come on its own. I love the fact that desire always comes unannounced.”

• The Gentleman From Peru ($29.40), published by Faber & Faber, is available from Amazon SG (amzn.to/4d60XRl).