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Summary
Summary
Call Me by Your Name is the story of a sudden and powerful romance that blossoms between an adolescent boy and a summer guest at his parents' cliff-side mansion on the Italian Riviera. Unprepared for the consequences of their attraction, at first each feigns indifference. But during the restless summer weeks that follow, unrelenting buried currents of obsession and fear, fascination and desire, intensify their passion as they test the charged ground between them. What grows from the depths of their spiritsis a romance of scarcely six weeks' duration and an experience that marks them for a lifetime. For what the two discover on the Riviera and during a sultry evening in Rome is the one thing both already fear they may never truly find again: total intimacy. The psychological maneuvers that accompany attraction have seldom been more shrewdly captured than in André Aciman's frank, unsentimental, heartrending elegy to human passion. Call Me by Your Name is clear-eyed, bare-knuckled, and ultimately unforgettable.
Author Notes
A regular contributor to the New Yorker, The New York Review of Books and The New Republic, Andre Aciman was born in Alexandria: raised in Egypt, Italy, and France; and educated at Harvard.
He teaches literature at Bard College and lives in Manhattan.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (6)
School Library Journal Review
Adult/High School-Seventeen-year-old Elio faces yet another lazy summer at his parents' home on the Italian coast. As in years past, his family will host a young scholar for six weeks, someone to help Elio's father with his research. Oliver, the handsome American visitor, charms everyone he meets with his cavalier manner. Elio's narrative dwells on the minutiae of his meandering thoughts and growing desire for Oliver. What begins as a casual friendship develops into a passionate yet clandestine affair, and the last chapters fast-forward through Elio's life to a reunion with Oliver decades later. Elio recalls the events of that summer and the years that follow in a voice that is by turns impatient and tender. He expresses his feelings with utter candor, sharing with readers his most private hopes, urges, and insecurities. The intimacy Elio experiences with Oliver is unparalleled and awakens in the protagonist an intensity that dances on the brink of obsession. Although their contact in the ensuing years is limited to the occasional phone call or postcard, Elio continues to harbor an insatiable desire for Oliver. His longing creates a tension that is present from the first sentence to the last.-Heidi Dolamore, San Mateo County Library, CA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Publisher's Weekly Review
Egyptian-born Aciman is the author of the acclaimed memoir Out of Egypt and of the essay collection False Papers. His first novel poignantly probes a boy's erotic coming-of-age at his family's Italian Mediterranean home. Elio 17, extremely well-read, sensitive and the son of a prominent expatriate professor finds himself troublingly attracted to this year's visiting resident scholar, recruited by his father from an American university. Oliver is 24, breezy and spontaneous, and at work on a book about Heraclitus. The young men loll about in bathing suits, play tennis, jog along the Italian Riviera and flirt. Both also flirt (and more) with women among their circle of friends, but Elio, who narrates, yearns for Oliver. Their shared literary interests and Jewishness help impart a sense of intimacy, and when they do consummate their passion in Oliver's room, they call each other by the other's name. A trip to Rome, sanctioned by Elio's prescient father, ushers Elio fully into first love's joy and pain, and his travails set up a well-managed look into Elio's future. Aciman overcomes an occasionally awkward structure with elegant writing in Elio's sweet and sanguine voice. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
Graceful debut novel by memoirist/literary scholar Aciman (False Papers, 2000, etc.), joining young love to his familiar themes of dislocation and wandering. One could be arrested in certain parts of the world for the young love in question, which joins a 17-year-old bookish musician who is improbably well educated--not many college-educated adults have read Celan, heard of Athanasius Kircher or have a context for the Latin cor cordium--with a 24-year-old scholar with one foot in the world of the classical Greeks and another in whatever demimondes an Italian seaside village can offer. Oliver has cruelly good looks and looks cruelly at the world, a "cold, sagacious judge of character and situations." Slathered in suntan oil, bronzing in the Mediterranean sun, he sends young Elio into a swoon at first sight. Oliver is well aware of the effect, for everyone, male and female, falls in love with him: Elio's professor father, whose houseguest Oliver is, has appreciation for the younger man's fearlessness in arguing over philosophy and etymology, the young village girls for his muvi star affectations, older women for his cowboy manners. Possibilities worthy of Highsmith loom, but though Oliver has his dangerous side (for one thing, he's a cardsharp), Aciman never quite dispenses with innocence; Elio's love has a certain chaste quality to it ("I was Glaucus and he was Diomedes"), which doesn't lessen the hurt when the whole thing unravels, at which point intellectual gamesmanship fades away and the wisest man in the book is revealed to be Elio's gently thoughtful father, who has unsuspected depths and offers consolation as best he can: "Right now there's sorrow. I don't envy you the pain. But I envy you the pain." That pain yields a happy ending, of a sort. With shades of Marguerite Duras and Patrick White, a quiet, literate and impeccably written love story. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
This first novel is a meditation on sexual longing as well as an exploration of the selfishness that such longing engenders. The author's beautiful articulation of the thrill and dismay of unspoken desire underscores the misunderstandings inherent in such a state. A first novel is usually judged by its sophistication level: by how much or how little the author sounds like a beginner. Aciman's debut is nimble, poised, perceptive, and intelligent. Its emphasis on psychology over plot does not leave it lacking in drive and movement. The novel depicts a male teenager who, although practiced in having to accept his parents' summer guests at their Italian seaside villa, is slammed by an unexpected provocation when, in the summer of his seventeenth year, a male graduate student arrives, and his obvious intelligence and charm are matched by an undisguised sexiness. What is disguised, at least initially, is the attraction the boy and the graduate student feel for each other. Once the games are stopped, however, and once their mutual desire is acknowledged, a torrid summer ensues--one that will live in the teenager's memory forever. --Brad Hooper Copyright 2006 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
THIS novel is hot. A coming-of-age story, a coming-out story, a Proustian meditation on time and desire, a love letter, an invocation and something of an epitaph, "Call Me by Your Name" is also an open question. It is an exceptionally beautiful book that cannot quite bring itself to draw the inevitable conclusion about axis-shifting passion that men and women of the world might like to think they will always reach - that that obscure object of desire is, by definition, ungraspable, indeterminate and already lost at exactly the moment you rush so fervently to hold him or her. The heat is in the longing, the unavailability as we like to say, the gap, the illusion, etc. But what André Aciman considers, elegantly and with no small amount of unbridled skin-to-skin contact, is that maybe the heat of eros isn't only in the friction of memory and anticipation. Maybe it's also in the getting. In a first novel that abounds in moments of emotional and physical abandon, this may be the most wanton of his moves: his narrative, brazenly, refuses to stay closed. It is as much a story of paradise found as it is of paradise lost. The literal story is a tale of adolescent sexual awakening, set in the very well-appointed home of an academic, on the Italian Riviera, in the mid-1980s. Elio, the precocious 17-year-old son of the esteemed and open-minded scholar and his wife, falls fast and hard for Oliver, a 24-year-old postdoc teaching at Columbia, who has come to the mansion for six weeks to revise his manuscript - on Heraclitus, since this is a novel about time and love - before publication. Elio is smart, nervous, naïve, but also bold; Oliver is handsome, seductive and breezily American, given to phrases like "Later," and abundantly "O.K. with" many things Elio is less O.K. with - O.K. with being Jewish, "with his body, with his looks, with his antic backhand, with his choice of books, music, films, friends." From the first page, we know we're in the crumbling terrain of memory. "I shut my eyes, say the word, and I'm back in Italy," Elio writes from some later vantage point. Which is also, of course, to say: I am not in Italy now, I am not that young man, what I am going to describe is long over. Heraclitus, indeed. The younger Elio has apparently been more or less heterosexual until Oliver arrives, but in fewer than 15 pages he's already in a state he calls the "swoon." He lies around on his bed in the long Mediterranean afternoons hoping Oliver will walk in, feeling "fire like fear, like panic, like one more minute of this and I'll die if he doesn't knock at my door, but I'd sooner he never knock than knock now. I had learned to leave my French windows ajar, and I'd lie on my bed wearing only my bathing suit, my entire body on fire. Fire like a pleading that says, Please, please, tell me I'm wrong, tell me I've imagined all this, because it can't possibly be true for you as well, and if it's true for you too, then you're the cruelest man alive." But it is true for Oliver, and he does knock, and then things really heat up. What Elio and Oliver do to a peach, for instance, might have made T. S. Eliot take a match to "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." Aciman, who has written so exquisitely about exile, loss and Proust in his book of essays, "False Papers," and his memoir, "Out of Egypt," is no less exquisite here in his evocation of Elio's adoration for the lost city of Oliver's body and the lost city of the love between the two men. He builds these lost cities with the extraordinary craftsmanship of obsession, carefully imagining every last element of Elio's affair with Oliver, depicting even the slightest touches and most mundane conversations with a nearly hyper-real attention to how, exactly, each one articulated a desire in Elio that felt "like coming home, like asking, Where have I been all my life?" Aciman never curbs or mocks Elio's unabashed adolescent romanticism, never wheels in repressive social forces to crush the lovers, never makes one the agent of the other's ruin. Even Elio's father is fairly "que será, será" about what he suspects has been going on (a lot) under his scholarly roof. What unwinds the men from each other's embrace is none of these clichés; instead, Aciman, Proustian to the core, moves them apart, renders their beautiful city Atlantis, with the subtlest, most powerful universal agent: time. Nobody gets clocked with a tire iron. No one betrays the other. One becomes ordinary and marries; the other's romantic fate is vague but seems to be more patchy. They meet again, 15 years later, and they're not tragic; all they are is older. The fully adult Elio thinks, "This thing that almost never was still beckons, I wanted to tell him." They "can never undo it, never unwrite it, never unlive it, or relive it. ... Going back is false. Moving ahead is false. Looking the other way is false." In a book that seems to wear its heart on its sleeve, this openhanded, open-ended gesture is also its most knowing, challenging moment. That the city of desire is a scrim, all "dream making and strange remembrance," Aciman seems to say, doesn't mean it would be any less false not to walk into it. And if the novel is mourning this city, it is also, brick by brick, rebuilding it before the reader's eyes. In his essay "Pensione Eolo," Aciman writes, "Ultimately, the real site of nostalgia is not the place that was lost or the place that was never quite had in the first place; it is the text that must record that loss." In other words, Elio and Oliver might give each other up, but the book that conjures them doesn't give up either one. In fact, it brings them back together, reunites them, for a glorious endless summer. In the book, the river can be revisited. The closing words echo the title: a phrase simultaneously of elegy and of invitation. What Elio and Oliver do to a peach might have made Eliot take a match to 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.' Stacey D'Erasmo's most recent novel is "A Seahorse Year."
Library Journal Review
Author of the celebrated memoir Out of Egypt, Aciman offers a debut novel about a brief but transformative summer affair between a teenager and a visitor at his parents' Italian villa. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.