Customer Reviews

Call Me by Your Name

5 star:		(87)
4 star:		(18)
3 star:		(8)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(8)

 

 

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

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.

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.

I read this extraordinary novel after seeing several good reviews, notably the one in the NY Times. It is a story of first love involving two men, but it can't really be classified as specialty literature. Here is a funny, harrowing, heartbreaking coming-of-age tale that everyone will instantly recognize.

A 17-year-old Italian boy discovers the joy and anguish of adult emotions one summer on the Italian Riviera. The lyrical prose, frank sexuality, and clear-eyed tone of the novel remind me of another instant classic, Francoise Sagan's BONJOUR TRISTESSE. I recently reread that personal favorite, and I had it in mind as I read this. Like Sagan, Aciman places us inside the mind of an uncannily precocious teenager, showing us everything through his eyes. His total fixation on the object of his passion--an older American post-grad scholar who's visiting for the summer--is overwhelming, and some of the scenes between the two are so intimate that reading them actually feels like an intrusion. But Aciman insists on telling the truth of every single moment of the affair, and his young hero has an unblinking gaze.

The rocky road to adulthood never changes--but every now and then we get a voice like this to tell us the story. I recommend CALL ME BY YOUR NAME to everyone who was ever 17.

Andre Aciman says more about love, passion, desire, sorrow and loss in only 248 pages in CALL ME BY YOUR NAME-- the story lives up to everything the beautiful title suggests-- than seems humanly possible. Elio, a precocious seventeen-year-old, falls hopeless, totally for Oliver, a twenty-four-year old from Columbia University who comes to stay with Elio's family for six weeks in an idyllic Italian sun-drenched summer. We see the events as they unfold through the eyes of the narrator Elio who is beautiful, bright, sexy and full of reckless abandon as only the very young can be. His and Oliver's story is universal and as old as civilization itself. None of us will ever forgot our first lover when his absence was unbearable but his presence was frightening and all-consuming.

It is impossible to do justice to this book as it is almost an extended poem. Like all poetry, it can survive dissection, but the least said about it, the better. A word to the reader, however: Beware. You will care desperately about these two men as well as other well-drawn characaters, particularly Elio's father, who is so gentle, so kind, so intuitive, such a wise parent and the tragic Vimini, who is ten years old at the beginning of the novel that covers a span of twenty years.

Mr. Aciman's beautiful prose is both poetic and profound: Words get turned around, turned in on themselves, used again in a different setting or context. Elio's quotation of Shelley's friends words, "heart of hearts," as he seized the dead poet's heart out of his body as he was being cremated, turns up again near the end of the novel as an inscription on a post card that Oliver ["'I've never said anything truer in my life to anyone'"] hopes his son will one day bring to Elio. Elio on Oliver: "You are my homecoming." "I look back on those days and regret none of it, not the risks, not the shame, nor the total lack of foresight." Finally his words to Oliver near the end of the novel: "'You are the only person I'd like to say goodbye to when I die, because only then will this thing I call my life make any sense. And if I should hear that you died, my life as I know it, the me who is speaking with you now, will cease to exist.'"

Mr. Aciman's descriptions of these two men's lovemaking is as torrid as the Italian sun; what these men do with a ripe peach is as erotic as anything D. H. Lawrence every wrote. Like all great literature, this novel will remind you of other fine fiction: for example, James Joyce's long short story about tragic lost young love, "The Dead," as well as Annie Proulx's more recent and much praised "Brokeback Mountain."

CALL ME BY YOUR NAME is one of the rarest of novels. You are at once so caught up in its drama that you race through it but hope it will never end since you fear that these two characters whom you care about so deeply will not grow old together.

Novels like this one never go out of style.

Many of the books I've read in the past have had glowing excerpts that stuck out as unparalleled pieces of prose that have stuck with me since I read them. The first page of Thomas Wolfe's LOOK HOMEWARD ANGEL is one of them. Another example is the excerpt on "Joey" in James Baldwin's GIOVANNI'S ROOM. There are parts of Patricia Nell Warren's THE FRONT RUNNER that still make me ache when I read them or even think about them; like the first time Harlan shows Billy that he loves him rather than hates him. But, up until now I've never read a complete book that held me spellbound from the opening sentence to the last.

CALL ME BY YOUR NAME by Andre Aciman is the story of a seventeen year old lad who falls hard for a twenty-four year old man who is rooming for the summer at his parents' home in Italy. Elio, the seventeen year old is the narrator and the tale that he tells is so alive and vivid. From the day to day pain of not knowing what is going on in the mind of the older man to the joy he feels when Oliver feeds him glimmers of hope. Elio tells the reader, almost in diary form, hiding nothing, how he feels as each moment passes.

Much like the way I felt when I was watching the movie BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN, I was so enthralled with the passion that Elio felt for Oliver, I wanted the boy's love to be reciprocated even if it ended badly. The sensuousness of the prose might offend some but not this reader. I found it refreshing to hear in the voice of a seventeen year old male how sex is always on his mind and how he would do almost anything to make his desires come to pass. Aciman also manages to get across in his prose the terror of a seventeen year old in the event his wishes do come true.

I agree with Colm Toibin, author of THE MASTER, that Andre Aciman has not only written a wonderful novel; he has perfomed a miracle.

In 1978, Edmund White wrote what's generally considered a literary masterpiece, Nocturnes for the King of Naples, in which a narrator recounts a tale of a lost lover, interspersed with memories of his father. Readers of White's book will encounter a similar theme in Aciman's book: a missed opportunity for what might have been the love of one's life. White's book interwove a conflicted relationship between the narrator and his father, giving it an additional dramatic level.

Aciman's book is an almost obsessively detailed account of a seventeen year old youth's sexual passion for an older (twenty-four year old) man. The degree of detail in the thought processes of the narrator in lusting after this older man is astonishing, and will be unsettling for some, but will largely ring true for many readers. This is the first book I've read that can manage to be elegant in its language while describing bodily fluids and functions that would give readers pause in the hands of a less skilful writer.

What's missing for me in this otherwise beautifully crafted novel is a second or third line of theme development, some of which make a brief appearance. For example, the narrator and his father make a significant and potentially moving connection towards the end of the book that might have become another important dimension in the narrative, complementing the love affair narrative. It's a missed chance at greatness by this gifted writer.

I started this book on Friday afternoon--you could say I took the weekend off, traveled to Italy, fell in love,and can't seem to believe it's a weekday again and that life is back to where it was before I met the two lovers in this novel. I only wish their story had been twice as long. The story couldn't be simpler, the style couldn't be more beautiful. And as for the sadness, I never want it to go away, because it came with passion and love.

Reading this novel can unleash so many memories both wanted and unwanted. For many of us our great love is not the person we spend our life with. We usually make the better choice of choosing someone less consuming, but the "what if" will always be there. Aciman has written something so true that at moments the intimacy is almost embarrassing. The story, which is basically commonplace, is told with such intensity that you can't put it down. The only recent fiction I can compare it too is Matthew Sadler's "Landscape: Memory".

...in years. This book moved me, deeply. The articulation and description of intimacy and growing passion, the slow realization and understanding of what love can be, the reliving of the feelings of complete surrender to passion that only comes, early in life, and the pain that can be a part of that... Crystalline evocation of the Italian culture and landscape and the lives of these two men, within it... When I finished this book, I simply put my hands over my face and sobbed myself to sleep...