Call Me by Your Name: A Novel Paperback – January 22, 2008

Such a lovely novel. The movie did it justice, but the book really stands on its own. Unforgettable. Erotic. Captures such specific feelings of young love, deep love, self discovery.

This is one of my favorite books of all time. I can’t explain how insane it drove me and how captivated I was by it. I couldn’t put it down. I’ll never forget this story.

Spoilery"Twenty years was yesterday, and yesterday was just earlier this morning, and morning seemed light years away."Call Me By Your Name is a superlative novel that meticulously and comprehensively looks at the human condition from the folly of youth to the introspective later years. Told almost entirely from the stream of consciousness mind of a seventeen year old Elio, who simultaneously possesses intelligence beyond his years whilst embodying the insouciance of youth and trafficking in the same inane fickleness of the average teen in matters of the heart, and in him Aciman’s crafted a character that is quintessentially relatable.I was immediately transported back to my own teenage years. I remember being that person, though Elio is leaps and bounds more intelligent at seventeen than I could ever hope to be then or now. The profundity of his insights are staggering and keenly observant. But the games are the same, the angst the same, the intensity the same and, most importantly, the devotion the same."There is a law somewhere that says that when one person is thoroughly smitten with the other, the other must unavoidably be smitten as well. […] Love, which exempts no one who’s loved from loving, Francesca’s words in the Inferno. Just wait and be hopeful. I was hopeful, though perhaps this was what I had wanted all along. To wait forever."First loves are oftentimes the hardest to let go of; they leave an indelible mark. For Elio, Oliver is that person. Oliver, the doctoral student who came to stay with him and his parents one summer in Italy, left a watermark on Elio’s soul. Six unforgettable weeks and an intimacy forged that some have no hope of ever attaining. They lived. They loved. They became a part of each other.People talk about the “simplicity” of youth but to my mind it was never simple. Elio has never been in love before and when you don’t know a thing it’s hard to know what to do with it, how to care for it, how to keep it. At seventeen he can’t possibly understand the rarity of his connection with Oliver, so he tells himself there will be another and there are, that it was never intended to last and maybe it wasn't, that is was a summer fling, but who's to say that makes it any less seminal?That’s what Aciman has done so masterfully with this novel; is it or isn’t it? Aciman has crafted his own Mona Lisa with Elio."All that remains is dreammaking and strange remembrance."Life goes on, people drift in and out of our lives; some leave a lasting impression while others are evanescent. Oliver left a space to be certain, but Elio left one too and maybe those spaces are capricious depending on time and space."-how we move through time, how time moves through us, how we change and keep changing and come back to the same."The ebbs and flows of life transmogrify memories; make them sharper at times and less so at others, depending on where one is in life. Again, I think this is the genius of this novel: it’s not a singular experience. I’ve no doubt if I reread it in 5 or 10 yrs I’ll have a different interpretation; a change in perspective and the whole thing looks completely different and I feel like the same can be said of Elio. Will it always come back to Oliver or is that they’re in the same place where so much occurred twenty years ago? That place that meant so much from the berm to Mafalda and his parents to the bookstore to playing the guitar to paradise to afternoon naps and lazy days and nights spent f***ing each other’s brains out. Is it so much Oliver or it is the desire to recapture that place, that time? The romantic in me wants to wallow in the heartbreak and vilify Aciman for countermanding the rules of romancelandia, but to simplify this novel in such a way, to make it solely about loss is a disservice to the narrative. It’s more than that."Time makes us sentimental. Perhaps, in the end, it is because of time that we suffer."The complexities of Call Me By Your Name left me feeling mawkish, clearly, but it also made me contemplative. Maybe I missed the point and it is solely a novel of love and loss with the primary objective being bittersweet heartbreak, but I choose to believe (this time) that Aciman deliberately penned a novel to make every reader take stock and cherish what they have, what they have had and what they will have. There aren’t very many novels I can say the same about.

I couldn’t easily place this book. I guess it falls in the category of summer romance, a story of the sudden passions that arise in the freedom and heat of vacation but don’t and can’t last when autumn comes. The book focuses on a highly educated and sensitive teenage boy living with his family in Italy who host a young American male professor for the summer. The boy quickly falls in a hopeless crush with the professor that at first left me confused. Where did this come from? But living in a beautiful Italian villa with every need supplied by the father’s bank account and household help what else is there to do? I suppose transcribing Hayden’s sonatas, quoting Dante, and hanging out with local Italian kids grows boring after a while.The first half of the book happens mostly in the boy’s mind who obsessively questions and analyzes every word and action of his beloved. So intense is this potent mix of sexual attraction, jealousy, and insecurity that it seems that he spends as much time avoiding the professor as chasing after him, just to find some peace of mind. Meanwhile, in the world outside the boy’s mind, life goes on. He swims, hangs out with his friends, and has sex with a local girl but it barely registers with him as he longs for some perfection that seems just out of reach. When it becomes apparent that the professor is attracted to him as well and they finally have sex about halfway through the book, the boy seems quite ready to experience all aspects of sex with another man. Which was like he'd been there before; maybe kids nowadays know everything. But it seems there is some story there that is unspoken. Is the boy really that innocent?The more I write this review the more I dislike the book for its unwillingness to look under its magical spell and see the loneliness, isolation and unhappiness of love divorced from reality. A love that is more about losing oneself (hence the title Call Me by Your Name, you are me, I am you, get it?) then about the joy of discovering and connecting with someone else. The story seems suspended from any real consequences. Does the boy eventually understand and accept his homosexuality so he can form a healthy relationship? No, in fact the only other gay characters in the book are held up for derision. Does anyone question the morality of the professor for sleeping with a younger and practically illegal boy? No, in fact, in a rather squirm-producing scene, the boy's father hints that he approved of the affair and wished he had something like that too.The boy seems trapped by this love, not freed. Many years later the two men meet and it seems like nothing much has happened in his life. No mention of a fruitful career or solid relationship. He seems in a trance-like state remembering the ashes of his once perfect love and hasn’t moved on. Maybe this book could be a better ghost story than a love story. But it needs a little more flesh on it to be that.In spite of all this, the book is a beautiful evocation of an idealized romance and certainly everyone, myself included, will recognize the pangs of one’s first crush and hopeless love. Its writing and evocation of time and place is excellent. If you accept it at that, I heartily recommend it.