Call Me by Your Name: A Novel [Paperback]

André Aciman (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 22, 2008

A New York Times Notable Book of the Year

A Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year

A Washington Post Best Fiction Book of the Year

A New York Magazine “Future Canon” Selection

A Chicago Tribune Favorite Book of the Year

One of The Seattle Times’ Michael Upchurch’s Favorite Books of the Year

An Amazon Top 100 Editors’ Picks of the Year

An Amazon Top 10 Editors’ pick: Debut Fiction (#6)

An Amazon Top 10 Editors’ pick: Gay & Lesbian (#1)

 

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' cliffside mansion on the Italian Riviera.  During the restless summer weeks, unrelenting but buried currents of obsession, fascination, and desire intensify their passion as they test the charged ground between them and verge toward the one thing both already fear they may never truly find again: total intimacy. André Aciman's critically acclaimed debut novel is a frank, unsentimental, heartrending elegy to human passion. 

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

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.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From School Library Journal

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. [...] His longing creates a tension that is present from the first sentence to the last.—Heidi Dolamore, San Mateo County Library, CA
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 256 pages
• Publisher: Picador (January 22, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 031242678X
• ISBN-13: 978-0312426781
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.5 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (128 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #321,249 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

André Aciman was born in Alexandria, Egypt and is an American memoirist, essayist, novelist, and scholar of seventeenth-century literature. He has also written many essays and reviews on Marcel Proust. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, The Paris Review, The New Republic, Condé Nast Traveler as well as in many volumes of The Best American Essays.

Aciman grew up in a multilingual and multinational family and attended English-language schools, first in Alexandria and later, after his family moved to Italy in 1965, in Rome. In 1968, Aciman's family moved again, this time to New York City, where he graduated in 1973 from Lehman College. Aciman received his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Harvard University and, after teaching at Princeton University and Bard College, is Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature at The Graduate Center of The City University of New York. He is currently chair of the Ph. D. Program in Comparative Literature and founder and director of The Writers' Institute at the Graduate Center. He has also taught creative writing at New York University and Yeshiva University. In 2009, Aciman was also Visiting Distinguished Writer at Wesleyan University.

Aciman is the author of the Whiting Award-winning memoir Out of Egypt (1995), an account of his childhood as a Jew growing up in post-colonial Egypt. His books and essays have been translated in many languages. In addition to Out of Egypt, Aciman has published two other books: False Papers: Essays in Exile and Memory (2001), and most recently a novel entitled Call Me By Your Name (2007), which was chosen as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and which won the Lambda Literary Award for Men's Fiction (2008). He also edited Letters of Transit (1999) and The Proust Project (2004) and prefaced Monsieur Proust (2003) and The Light of New York (2007).

His forthcoming novel Eight White Nights (FSG) will be published on February 14, 2010

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

288 of 293 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Reflections on a Summer of Love, February 6, 2008

By 

Grady Harp (Los Angeles, CA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Call Me by Your Name: A Novel (Hardcover)

CALL ME BY YOUR NAME is one of those books so rich in story, in content, and in style of writing that it immediately becomes one of the great novels of the time. With this novel André Aciman steps into the rarefied air of writers such as Jamie O'Neill, Colm Toibin, Reinaldo Arenas, Constantine Cavafy, Edmund White, Michael Cunningham, and even EM Forster and Thomas Mann - a disparate group of luminaries, perhaps, but each with the ability to create an evocative, sensual love story beyond the limits of traditional tales. Though highly recommended by friends over the past year, this reader only now had the pleasure of reading this novel, and the result was to immediately read it again, so rich are the treasures this book holds.

Agreeing with other reviewers that telling too much of the plot is unfair to those who have yet to read Aciman's book, suffice it to say that CALL ME BY YOUR NAME is a meditation on the awakening of love, the myriad emotional and physical responses of the act of attraction developing into acting out and becoming an obsession, and the indelible mark that 'first love' makes on the hearts and lives of those involved.

Elio is a beautiful seventeen-year old lad, transcribing Haydn's 'The Seven Last Words of Christ' in his Mediterranean villa where his parents annually invite a young writer for a six-week residency to complete a work and assist the father in his own work. This summer the resident scholar is twenty-four-year old American scholar Oliver who is having his work on Heraclitus translated into Italian. There is an attraction between the two young men, a veiled dance of courtship, and an ultimate revelation of a profound love that becomes intensely physical as it develops from its intellectual and artistic beginnings. The 'love affair', as erotic as any in literature, is fully realized on a brief trip to Rome, and then the two part: Elio remains in Italy and Oliver returns to the US. And after the summer's transforming events Elio narrates the next twenty years, sharing the impact of his first experience with love with the reader. The title of the book echoes the words the lovers' exchange during intimacy: each becomes the other and in doing so completely acknowledges himself.

Aciman writes so eloquently, so sensually, and so intelligently that many passages beg re-reading as soon as the impact of a paragraph is complete. Quoting from the book is almost impossible: where would you start to isolate excerpts in a work that has no weak pages? Yes, this is a gay love story, but it is far more than that. This is a meditation on the miracle of the transformations love induces, and those transformations are universal. A book of such quality should find a wide audience: André Aciman is writer of rare genius. Highly recommended. Grady Harp, February 08

85 of 87 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An Impressive Debut Novel from Andre Aciman, December 31, 2007

By 

John Kwok (New York, NY USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Call Me by Your Name: A Novel (Hardcover)

Andre Aciman, a noted essayist and City University of New York professor of comparative literature, has written one of the most memorable debut novels published this year, "Call Me by Your Name", ranking alongside Eugene Drucker's "The Savior" for its emotional intensity, as well as its high literary quality. It's a truly memorable coming-of-age story about an adolescent Italian Jewish man, Elio, who learns a lot about love and total intimacy from a visiting American professor, Oliver, during a brief six week period one summer, set, sometime, in Italy, back in the 1970s or 1980s. Aciman offers us an honest, unflinching portrait of total intimacy, showing how these two men gradually move from mere friendship to an all too brief, but intense, romantic encounter, in a small town on the Italian Riviera, and then later, one night, in Rome, shortly before Oliver flies back home. It is an encounter that will truly haunt both men for the rest of their lives, as depicted in occasional scenes that jump forward to the present day. Aciman's portrait is truly compelling, and one that I found impossible to put down (No wonder why it has been considered for prominent literary awards, such as the American Academy of Arts and Letters' Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction.); Aciman is not only a fine literary stylist, but a compelling storyteller too. Without question, his fine novel deserves ample consideration, not only from those familiar with his excellent nonfiction prose, but also from others, such as yours truly, who are not fully acquainted with his work.

56 of 57 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A romantic novel for intellectuals, January 27, 2008

By 

Coco Pazzo (Long Beach, CA) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Call Me by Your Name: A Novel (Paperback)

A gay romance novel for intellectuals, Andre Aciman's debut novel is an exciting trip into precocious mind of a young teenager who falls in love with an older man. While Aciman's debt to Proust is acknowledged by the author, one can hear echoes of Edmund White, Allan Hollinghurst and even A.S. Byatt in Aciman's melancholy prose.