It’s heartening to meet a public figure who opts for silence, detachment and tact. ‘I distance myself when I speak about things by not going into details about the immediacy of the here and now,’ André Aciman tells me.
In his view writers should not respond rashly to major news events, unless they’re reporters: ‘You have to give these events time to develop a new skin, before you write about them.’ If only other authors and celebrities were as restrained. So many speak out in pursuit of followers on social media, appeasing those who will mobilise and target them if they fail to hold the correct views. ‘I think an entirely intelligent person is always ambivalent,’ he says. ‘You have to be ambivalent because you can always see the two sides of the same thing.’
Throughout his works he refers to ‘vigils’ to describe the return to places from the past that bring a memory to life in the present. ‘This is how I always travel,’…