Mr. Aciman revisits Rome, where he lived for three years as a bookish teenager, only to find that he is unable to recover any authentic memory of the city because his youthful experience of it was filtered almost entirely through literature—in this case, the short stories of James Joyce. He fondly recalls the Via Clelia mantled in snow and then corrects himself: This was the Irish snow of Joyce’s “The Dead” lending the street “a luster that would never have existed outside of books”—or in Italy. Even more frustratingly, it turns out that this trick of imagining himself elsewhere was shared by Joyce himself, so that “my love for Rome … was perhaps no more than my love for a might-be-life born from a story Joyce had penned during his hapless stay in Rome, thinking of his half-real, half-remembered Dublin.”