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Call Me by Your Name: A Novel Kindle Edition
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Now a Major Motion Picture from Director Luca Guadagnino, Starring Armie Hammer and Timothée Chalamet, and Written by Three-Time Oscar™ Nominee James Ivory
The Basis of the Oscar-Winning Best Adapted Screenplay
A New York Times Bestseller
A USA Today Bestseller
A Los Angeles Times Bestseller
A Vulture Book Club Pick
An Instant Classic and One of the Great Love Stories of Our Time
Andre Aciman's 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. Each is unprepared for the consequences of their attraction, when, during the restless summer weeks, unrelenting currents of obsession, fascination, and desire intensify their passion and test the charged ground between them. Recklessly, the two verge toward the one thing both fear they may never truly find again: total intimacy. It is an instant classic and one of the great love stories of our time.
Winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Ficition
A New York Times Notable Book of the Year • A Publishers Weekly and The Washington Post Best Book of the Year • A New York Magazine "Future Canon" Selection • A Chicago Tribune and Seattle Times (Michael Upchurch's) Favorite Favorite Book of the Year
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherFarrar, Straus and Giroux
- Publication dateJanuary 22, 2008
- File size2106 KB
Perhaps we were friends first and lovers second. But then perhaps this is what lovers are.Highlighted by 8,085 Kindle readers
Time makes us sentimental. Perhaps, in the end, it is because of time that we suffer.Highlighted by 7,572 Kindle readers
P.S. We are not written for one instrument alone; I am not, neither are you.Highlighted by 6,596 Kindle readers
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From School Library Journal
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the paperback edition.
From Publishers Weekly
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the paperback edition.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
If Not Later, When?
"Later!" The word, the voice, the attitude.
I'd never heard anyone use "later" to say goodbye before. It sounded harsh, curt, and dismissive, spoken with the veiled indifference of people who may not care to see or hear from you again.
It is the first thing I remember about him, and I can hear it still today. Later!
I shut my eyes, say the word, and I'm back in Italy, so many years ago, walking down the tree-lined driveway, watching him step out of the cab, billowy blue shirt, wide-open collar, sunglasses, straw hat, skin everywhere. Suddenly he's shaking my hand, handing me his backpack, removing his suitcase from the trunk of the cab, asking if my father is home.
It might have started right there and then: the shirt, the rolled-up sleeves, the rounded balls of his heels slipping in and out of his frayed espadrilles, eager to test the hot gravel path that led to our house, every stride already asking, Which way to the beach?
This summer's houseguest. Another bore.
Then, almost without thinking, and with his back already turned to the car, he waves the back of his free hand and utters a careless Later! to another passenger in the car who has probably split the fare from the station. No name added, no jest to smooth out the ruffled leave-taking, nothing. His one-word send-off: brisk, bold, and blunted--take your pick, he couldn't be bothered which.
You watch, I thought, this is how he'll say goodbye to us when the time comes. With a gruff, slapdash Later!
Meanwhile, we'd have to put up with him for six long weeks.
I was thoroughly intimidated. The unapproachable sort.
I could grow to like him, though. From rounded chin to rounded heel. Then, within days, I would learn to hate him.
This, the very person whose photo on the application form months earlier had leapt out with promises of instant affinities.
Taking in summer guests was my parents' way of helping young academics revise a manuscript before publication. For six weeks each summer I'd have to vacate my bedroom and move one room down the corridor into a much smaller room that had once belonged to my grandfather. During the winter months, when we were away in the city, it became a part-time toolshed, storage room, and attic where rumor had it my grandfather, my namesake, still ground his teeth in his eternal sleep. Summer residents didn't have to pay anything, were given the full run of the house, and could basically do anything they pleased, provided they spent an hour or so a day helping my father with his correspondence and assorted paperwork. They became part of the family, and after about fifteen years of doing this, we had gotten used to a shower of postcards and gift packages not only around Christmastime but all year long from people who were now totally devoted to our family and would go out of their way when they were in Europe to drop by B. for a day or two with their family and take a nostalgic tour of their old digs.
At meals there were frequently two or three other guests, sometimes neighbors or relatives, sometimes colleagues, lawyers, doctors, the rich and famous who'd drop by to see my father on their way to their own summer houses. Sometimes we'd even open our dining room to the occasional tourist couple who'd heard of the old villa and simply wanted to come by and take a peek and were totally enchanted when asked to eat with us and tell us all about themselves, while Mafalda, informed at the last minute, dished out her usual fare. My father, who was reserved and shy in private, loved nothing better than to have some precocious rising expert in a field keep the conversation going in a few languages while the hot summer sun, after a few glasses of rosatello, ushered in the unavoidable afternoon torpor. We named the task dinner drudgery--and, after a while, so did most of our six-week guests.
Maybe it started soon after his arrival during one of those grinding lunches when he sat next to me and it finally dawned on me that, despite a light tan acquired during his brief stay in Sicily earlier that summer, the color on the palms of his hands was the same as the pale, soft skin of his soles, of his throat, of the bottom of his forearms, which hadn't really been exposed to much sun. Almost a light pink, as glistening and smooth as the underside of a lizard's belly. Private, chaste, unfledged, like a blush on an athlete's face or an instance of dawn on a stormy night. It told me things about him I never knew to ask.
It may have started during those endless hours after lunch when everybody lounged about in bathing suits inside and outside the house, bodies sprawled everywhere, killing time before someone finally suggested we head down to the rocks for a swim. Relatives, cousins, neighbors, friends, friends of friends, colleagues, or just about anyone who cared to knock at our gate and ask if they could use our tennis court--everyone was welcome to lounge and swim and eat and, if they stayed long enough, use the guesthouse.
Or perhaps it started on the beach. Or at the tennis court. Or during our first walk together on his very first day when I was asked to show him the house and its surrounding area and, one thing leading to the other, managed to take him past the very old forged-iron metal gate as far back as the endless empty lot in the hinterland toward the abandoned train tracks that used to connect B. to N. "Is there an abandoned station house somewhere?" he asked, looking through the trees under the scalding sun, probably trying to ask the right question of the owner's son. "No, there was never a station house. The train simply stopped when you asked." He was curious about the train; the rails seemed so narrow. It was a two-wagon train bearing the royal insignia, I explained. Gypsies lived in it now. They'd been living there ever since my mother used to summer here as a girl. The gypsies had hauled the two derailed cars farther inland. Did he want to see them? "Later. Maybe." Polite indifference, as if he'd spotted my misplaced zeal to play up to him and was summarily pushing me away.
But it stung me.
Instead, he said he wanted to open an account in one of the banks in B., then pay a visit to his Italian translator, whom his Italian publisher had engaged for his book.
I decided to take him there by bike.
The conversation was no better on wheels than on foot. Along the way, we stopped for something to drink. The bar-tabaccheria was totally dark and empty. The owner was mopping the floor with a powerful ammonia solution. We stepped outside as soon as we could. A lonely blackbird, sitting in a Mediterranean pine, sang a few notes that were immediately drowned out by the rattle of the cicadas.
I took a long swill from a large bottle of mineral water, passed it to him, then drank from it again. I spilled some on my hand and rubbed my face with it, running my wet fingers through my hair. The water was insufficiently cold, not fizzy enough, leaving behind an unslaked likeness of thirst.
What did one do around here?
Nothing. Wait for summer to end.
What did one do in the winter, then?
I smiled at the answer I was about to give. He got the gist and said, "Don't tell me: wait for summer to come, right?"
I liked having my mind read. He'd pick up on dinner drudgery sooner than those before him.
"Actually, in the winter the place gets very gray and dark. We come for Christmas. Otherwise it's a ghost town."
"And what else do you do here at Christmas besides roast chestnuts and drink eggnog?"
He was teasing. I offered the same smile as before. He understood, said nothing, we laughed.
He asked what I did. I played tennis. Swam. Went out at night. Jogged. Transcribed music. Read.
He said he jogged too. Early in the morning. Where did one jog around here? Along the promenade, mostly. I could show him if he wanted.
It hit me in the face just when I was starting to like him again: "Later, maybe."
I had put reading last on my list, thinking that, with the willful, brazen attitude he'd displayed so far, reading would figure last on his. A few hours later, when I remembered that he had just finished writing a book on Heraclitus and that "reading" was probably not an insignificant part of his life, I realized that I needed to perform some clever backpedaling and let him know that my real interests lay right alongside his. What unsettled me, though, was not the fancy footwork needed to redeem myself. It was the unwelcome misgivings with which it finally dawned on me, both then and during our casual conversation by the train tracks, that I had all along, without seeming to, without even admitting it, already been trying--and failing--to win him over.
When I did offer--because all visitors loved the idea--to take him to San Giacomo and walk up to the very top of the belfry we nicknamed To-die-for, I should have known better than to just stand there without a comeback. I thought I'd bring him around simply by taking him up there and letting him take in the view of the town, the sea, eternity. But no. Later!
But it might have started way later than I think without my noticing anything at all. You see someone, but you don't really see him, he's in the wings. Or you notice him, but nothing clicks, nothing "catches," and before you're even aware of a presence, or of something troubling you, the six weeks that were offered you have almost passed and he's either already gone or just about to leave, and you're basically scrambling to come to terms with something, which, unbeknownst to you, has been brewing for weeks under your very nose and bears all the symptoms of what you're forced to call I want. How couldn't I have known, you ask? I know desire when I see it--and yet, this time, it slipped by completely. I was going for the devious smile that would suddenly light up his face each time he'd read my mind, when all I really wanted was skin, just skin.
At dinner on his third evening, I sensed that he was staring at me as I was explaining Haydn's Seven Last Words of Christ, which I'd been transcribing. I was seventeen that year and, being the youngest at the table and the least likely to be listened to, I had developed the habit of smuggling as much information into the fewest possible words. I spoke fast, which gave people the impression that I was always flustered and muffling my words. After I had finished explaining my transcription, I became aware of the keenest glance coming from my left. It thrilled and flattered me; he was obviously interested--he liked me. It hadn't been as difficult as all that, then. But when, after taking my time, I finally turned to face him and take in his glance, I met a cold and icy glare--something at once hostile and vitrified that bordered on cruelty.
It undid me completely. What had I done to deserve this? I wanted him to be kind to me again, to laugh with me as he had done just a few days earlier on the abandoned train tracks, or when I'd explained to him that same afternoon that B. was the only town in Italy where the corriera, the regional bus line, carrying Christ, whisked by without ever stopping. He had immediately laughed and recognized the veiled allusion to Carlo Levi's book. I liked how our minds seemed to travel in parallel, how we instantly inferred what words the other was toying with but at the last moment held back.
He was going to be a difficult neighbor. Better stay away from him, I thought. To think that I had almost fallen for the skin of his hands, his chest, his feet that had never touched a rough surface in their existence--and his eyes, which, when their other, kinder gaze fell on you, came like the miracle of the Resurrection. You could never stare long enough but needed to keep staring to find out why you couldn't.
I must have shot him a similarly wicked glance.
For two days our conversations came to a sudden halt.
On the long balcony that both our bedrooms shared, total avoidance: just a makeshift hello, good morning, nice weather, shallow chitchat.
Then, without explanation, things resumed.
Did I want to go jogging this morning? No, not really. Well, let's swim, then.
Today, the pain, the stoking, the thrill of someone new, the promise of so much bliss hovering a fingertip away, the fumbling around people I might misread and don't want to lose and must second-guess at every turn, the desperate cunning I bring to everyone I want and crave to be wanted by, the screens I put up as though between me and the world there were not just one but layers of rice-paper sliding doors, the urge to scramble and unscramble what was never really coded in the first place--all these started the summer Oliver came into our house. They are embossed on every song that was a hit that summer, in every novel I read during and after his stay, on anything from the smell of rosemary on hot days to the frantic rattle of the cicadas in the afternoon--smells and sounds I'd grown up with and known every year of my life until then but that had suddenly turned on me and acquired an inflection forever colored by the events of that summer.
Or perhaps it started after his first week, when I was thrilled to see he still remembered who I was, that he didn't ignore me, and that, therefore, I could allow myself the luxury of passing him on my way to the garden and not having to pretend I was unaware of him. We jogged early on the first morning--all the way up to B. and back. Early the next morning we swam. Then, the day after, we jogged again. I liked racing by the milk delivery van when it was far from done with its rounds, or by the grocer and the baker as they were just getting ready for business, liked to run along the shore and the promenade when there wasn't a soul about yet and our house seemed a distant mirage. I liked it when our feet were aligned, left with left, and struck the ground at the same time, leaving footprints on the shore that I wished to return to and, in secret, place my foot where his had left its mark.
This alternation of running and swimming was simply his "routine" in graduate school. Did he run on the Sabbath? I joked. He always exercised, even when he was sick; he'd exercise in bed if he had to. Even when he'd slept with someone new the night before, he said, he'd still head out for a jog early in the morning. The only time he didn't exercise was when they operated on him. When I asked him what for, the answer I had promised never to incite in him came at me like the thwack of a jack-in-the-box wearing a baleful smirk. "Later."
Perhaps he was out of breath and didn't want to talk too much or just wanted to concentrate on his swimming or his running. Or perhaps it was his way of spurring me to do the same--totally harmless.
But there was something at once chilling and off-putting in the sudden distance that crept between us in the most unexpected moments. It was almost as though he were doing it on purpose; feeding me slack, and more slack, and then yanking away any semblance of fellowship.
The steely gaze always returned. One day, while I was practicing my guitar at what had become "my table" in the back garden by the pool and he was lying nearby on the grass, I recognized the gaze right away. He had been staring at me while I was focusing on the fingerboard, and when I suddenly raised my face to see if he liked what I was playing, there it was: cutting, cruel, like a glistening blade instantly retracted the moment its victim caught sight of it. He gave me a bland smile, as though to say, No point hiding it now.
Stay away from him.
He must have noticed I was shaken and in an effort to make it up to me began asking me questions about the guitar. I was too much on my guard to answer him with candor. Meanwhile, hearing me scramble for answers made him suspect that perhaps more was amiss than I was showing. "Don't bother explaining. Just play it again." But I thought you hated it. Hated it? Whatever gave you that idea? We argued back and forth. "Just play it, will you?" "The same one?" "The same one."
I stood up and walked into the living room, leaving the large French windows open so that he might hear me play it on the piano. He followed me halfway and, leaning on the windows' wooden frame, listened for a while.
"You changed it. It's not the same. What did you do to it?"
"I just played it the way Liszt would have played it had he jimmied around with it."
"Just play it again, please!"
I liked the way he feigned exasperation. So I started playing the piece again.
After a while: "I can't believe you changed it again."
"Well, not by much. This is just how Busoni would have played it if he had altered Liszt's version."
"Can't you just play the Bach the way Bach wrote it?"
"But Bach never wrote it for guitar. He may not even have written it for the harpsichord. In fact, we're not even sure it's by Bach at all."
"Forget I asked."
"Okay, okay. No need to get so worked up," I said. It was my turn to feign grudging acquiescence. "This is the Bach as transcribed by me without Busoni and Liszt. It's a very young Bach and it's dedicated to his brother."
I knew exactly what phrase in the piece must have stirred him the first time, and each time I played it, I was sending it to him as a little gift, because it was really dedicated to him, as a token of something very beautiful in me that would take no genius to figure out and that urged me to throw in an extended cadenza. Just for him.
We were--and he must have recognized the signs long before I did--flirting.
Excerpted from Call Me By Your Name by André Aciman. Copyright © 2007 by André Aciman. Published in January 2007 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the paperback edition.
From Bookmarks Magazine
Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc. --This text refers to the paperback edition.
From Booklist
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the paperback edition.
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About the Author
Product details
- ASIN : B004L62E08
- Publisher : Farrar, Straus and Giroux (January 22, 2008)
- Publication date : January 22, 2008
- Language : English
- File size : 2106 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Sticky notes : On Kindle Scribe
- Print length : 242 pages
- Best Sellers Rank: #25,801 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #16 in LGBTQ+ Literary Fiction (Kindle Store)
- #33 in LGBTQ+ Literary Fiction (Books)
- #109 in Gay & Lesbian
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About the author

André Aciman is an American memoirist, essayist, and New York Times bestselling novelist originally from Alexandria, Egypt. 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 New Republic, Condé Nast Traveler, The Paris Review, Granta 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, Cooper Union, and 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 (1995), Aciman has published False Papers: Essays in Exile and Memory (2001) and Alibis: Essays on Elswhere (2011), and four novels, Enigma Variations (2017), Harvard Square (2013), Eight White Nights (2010) and Call Me By Your Name (2007), for which he 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), The Light of New York (2007), Condé Nast Traveler's Room With a View (2010) and Stefan Zweig's Journey to the Past (2010). His novel Call Me by Your Name has been turned into a film (2017), directed by Luca Guadagnino, with a screenplay by James Ivory, and starring Armie Hammer and Timothée Chalamet.
He is currently working on his fifth novel and a collection of essays.
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I’d say to give it a go!
"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.
There are several problems with this book. The first is general lack of consistency. There is much made about the apricot orchard on the family land--the care of the trees and the careful grafting done by the gardener, as well as the squeezing of apricot juice each morning by the cook. Later, Elio masturbates into a peach from the same orchard. Now, is apricots or peaches that are grown on the family land? At one point, Oliver asks Elio why he knows so much. Elio states that he reads a great deal, because there is no television. Soon after, the whole family--including Elio, the cook, and house gues Oliver spend an evening watching television. At one point, during an excursion into town, there is a passage in which Oliver has started to smoke Gauloise, and Elio smokes one as well. Later, just prior to their first sexual encounter, on entering Oliver's room, Elio states, "I didn't know you smoked." There are several more instances of this. While this is not necessarily a fatal flaw, it does show that this book really needed some more editing. This is just general sloppiness.
There are other things wrong with this book that I consider to be more troublesome. In several instances, some ideas that may or may not work are mentioned and then dropped. One is the shared Jewish identity between Oliver and Elio and his family. Oliver seems much more open about this, wearing a Star of David around his neck, while Elio and his family have a tendency to hide this fact. Nothing more is made of this, however. I think this might have made for some interesting discussion. A minor character names Vimini is brought in early, and we find out she has leukemia. I'm not sure why Aciman brings this into the story--was it some sort of carpe diem theme--get on with things before it's too late? It is unclear, since really nothing more is mentioned of it until the very end. Both of these could have been dropped without disrupting the flow of the story. They are completely unnecessary to the plot or themes. Again, more careful editing probably would have helped.
I had problems with Elio as a narrator of this story. I really didn't "buy" his voice as authentic adolescent. Edmund White was so much more successful with the adolescent narrator in A Boy's Own Story, a book which is so much more successful. And even Elio's narration is not consistent. "It might have started right there and then," or "Maybe is started after his arrival," or "Or perhaps is started on the beach. Or at the tennis court. Or during our first walk together..." while at the same time calling Oliver "This summer's houseguest. Another bore." But at the end of the book, we find out that Elio had deliberately picked out Oliver, based on his photo, from a number of other candidates. "I wanted it to be you. I made sure they picked you." And actually this might have made this a better book, if the tone of unreliability had been more consistent throughout.
Making Elio an unreliable narrator may have made the book more successful and more enjoyable. Other ways this material may have worked better include having several different narrators. I think I would have preferred having alternation chapters, from Elio's point of view, and then from Oliver's point of view. Including some of the other characters--seeing things from Elio's father's point of view, or the cook's point of view, etc. Making one of the characters flawed in some spectular way would have made this more interesting, such as Gary Indiana's Horse Crazy. In Horse Crazy, the person of the narrator's obsession--a waiter named Gregory Burgess--is bisexual, addicted to heroine, and unstable. (Horse Crazy is a much more successful book than Call Me by Your Name.)
Having an omniscient narrator telling the story from the outside may have lead to a more interesting and successful book. A good example of this would be James Salter's A Sport and a Pastime.
Much is made of the "flirting" between Elio and Olver, but then there are the moments of doubt. Was he actually flirting or not? But then the line is crossed. Elio enters Oliver's room, going through his things, trying on his clothes, masturbating on his bed. We have crossed the line from flirting to stalking. But nothing is ever mentioned about this again, another one of the inconsistencies. Though actually, having one of the men be more predatory (though again nothing new) may have made this material more interesting. Examples of novels with sexual predators include John Fowles' The Collector and Cormac McCarthy's Child of God. Both of these are so much more interesting.
A nice contrast is David Plante's The Catholic. The Catholic is very similar in theme, but is a much more successful book. Again, we have a man who is looking back at his late adolescence. But being Catholic is important here, as he struggles with the ideas of guilt and sin, and attempting to break free from the shelter of his family and church to a wider world (themes that seem to be at the heart of Call Me by Your Name, but are not dealt with as successfully). Here is Dan Francoeur: "I often thought, in my teens, that I would like to distance myself so far from myself that I would see the dark, angular-faced, blue-eyed person I was as someone apart from me, and I would try to account for someone altogether different. Though I would use the first person, I would be thinking always in terms of the third person, so "I" would think "he" and he would have nothing to do with me.
"I believed that a person shouldn't think about himself. I though about myself all the time. Other people thought about themselves a lot, and did so with pleasure. I imagined this was because of what they had to think about in themselves. What I was helplessly drawn to thinking about in myself gave me great displeasure. If only I were able to consider myself as someone different from myself, he would maybe give me something else to think about.
"This someone became my college room-mate.
"Sitting at my desk in our room, I heard shouting from the shower room, and I went in. Charlie was in one of a line of occupied cubicles, the plastic curtains drawn back, and he and other dorm-mates showering were shouting and lauhging. I associated this image of Charlie, not in retrospect but at the moment it occurred, with everything that was outside me. Though we were both male, I imagined I was so different from Charlie that we didn't share a sex....I knew Charlie, but, suddenly, I didn't know him."
The cracking of the shell continues, with late night conversations and reading the poetry of Walt Whitman. Here, the mention of Walt Whitman is important to Dan's sudden awakening conscience, not name-dropping, as seems to occur in Call Me by Your Name (Heraclitus, Shelley, Haydn, Monet, others).
To reiterate, I do not see Call Me by Your Name as a successful effort. It certainly shows that Andre Aciman has talent. But I would say that this book really was not finished. It is in need of some serious rewriting and careful editing. The other books I mentioned--A Boy's Own Story, Child of God, The Catholic, Horse Crazy, A Sport and a Pastime--are worth reading and so much more successful. Read any of these. Pass on Call Me by Your Name.
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"It is the first thing I remember about him, and I can hear it still today. Later! I shut my eyes, say the word, and I'm back in Italy, so many years ago, walking down the tree-lined driveway, watching him step out of the cab, billowy blue shirt, wide-open collar, sunglasses, straw hat, skin everywhere. Suddenly he's shaking my hand, handing me his backpack, removing his suitcase from the trunk of the cab, asking if my father is home."
Den ganzen Roman bestimmt von Anfang an ein melancholisch-sehnsüchtiger Grundton, der sich bis zum Ende hält und sich eher noch steigert. Ein Sehnen, das nie zu Ende geht. Das ganze Leben lang. Letztlich geht es hier um die Wirkung der Zeit auf die Menschen und ihre Gefühle und darum, dass ein Paradies nur in der Erinnerung aufrechterhalten werden kann. Darum, wie immer wieder Teile der Persönlichkeit herausgerissen und immer neue Schichten darübergelegt wurden, wie bei einer sehr alten Kirche. Darum wie man sich dabei oberflächlich verändert oder die äußeren Bedingungen, aber vielleicht tief unter den neuen Schichten noch einen Rest Ihrer Liebe von damals entdeckt werden kann. Etwas, was sie geprägt hat, auf der sie sich alles gründet.
Time makes us sentimental. Perhaps, in the end, it is because of time that we suffer.
Das Buch ist in vier Kapitel eingeteilt und die Geschichte der beiden Männer wird aus subjektiver Sicht Elios erzählt im Rückblick 20 Jahre später.
Im ersten trifft Elio (17) auf Oliver (24), den amerikanischen Doktoranden, der über sechs Wochen in Ihrem Haus in Italien verbringen soll, um dort zu arbeiten. Vom ersten Moment an richtet sich eine fast obsessive Aufmerksamkeit auf Oliver. Jeder Schritt, jede Aussage, jedes Verhalten Olivers wird analysiert und interpretiert, jede Stelle seines Körpers gescannt. Wir sind in Elios Kopf. Aber Oliver ist abweisend. Elio hasst ihn dafür aber im nächsten Moment verfällt er ihm wieder, sobald er von dem anderen etwas Aufmerksamkeit oder Zuspruch erfährt.
Im zweiten und längsten Kapitel gesteht Elio nach ca. zwei Wochen der Qualen Oliver seine Empfindungen. Trotz Zögerns seitens Olivers beginnt eine erst sehr vorsichtige Annäherung, die noch über weitere zwei Wochen andauert bis auch bei Ihm alle Schranken fallen.
Im dritten Kapitel verbringen beide gemeinsam Olivers letzte Tage in Rom, wo sie das erste mal außerhalb des paradiesischen elterlichen Hauses sind, fern von Elios Familie.
Im letzten Kapitel beschreibt Elio Treffen der beiden 15 und 20 Jahre später und wie er versucht herauszufinden, was von Ihrer Liebe noch überlebt hat. Dieser Teil ist der melancholischste, dichteste und schönste und fehlt im Film fast vollständig. So viele der poetischen Sätze in diesem Kapitel könnte man einrahmen und an die Wand hängen.
Die Sprache ist dicht, intensiv und sehr erotisch, dabei aber wunderschön und nie pornografisch.. Emotional aber nicht kitschig. Die Sätze sind teilweise sehr lang und verwunden:
…It would finally dawn on us both that he was more me than I had ever been myself, because when he became me and I became him in bed so many years ago, he was and would forever remain, long after every forked road in life had done its work, my brother, my friend, my father, my son, my husband, my lover, myself.
Dieser Satz beschreibt auch gefühlvoll die Essenz dieser Liebe, die vielleicht weit über eine Beziehung hinausgeht. Sie finden sich jeweils selbst durch den anderen. "Call me by Your name and I'll call You by mine". Alles was ein Mann für Elio sein kann, war vereinigt in Oliver. Allumfassend und total, bis hin zum Verschmelzen zu einem gemeinsamen Wesen. Hier werden Vorstellungen aus der Antike wieder erweckt.
Von solchen wunderschönen sinnlichen Sätzen gibt es so viele in diesem Buch, hier noch ein Beispiel:
From this moment on, I thought, from this moment on – I had , as I'd never before in my life, the distinct feeling of arriving somewhere very dear, of wanting it forever, of being me, me, me, me and no one else, just me, of finding in each shiver that ran down my arms something totally alien and yet by no means unfamiliar, as if all this had been part of me all my life and I'd misplaced it and he helped me find it.
Der Autor arbeitet auch mit der Vorstellung von gespiegelten Liebhabern, die den jeweils anderen bei dem eigenen Namen nennen, Das Symbol Ihrer Verbundenheit und Einheit (und Gleichheit), wobei die Spiegelung auch ein eindeutig queeres Element der Geschichte bildet. Auch die beiden Namen sind bewusst gewählt: Wenn man das V und das R aus OLIVER entfernt, bleibt OLIE übrig, aus dem man ELIO bilden kann. Oliver ist in Elios Augen die vollkommenere und bessere Version von sich selbst. Er schaut zu ihm auf, vergöttert ihn, will zugleich bei ihm sein und er sein. Man kann das im wahren Leben bei den sogenannten „Boyfriend Twins“ beobachten.
Auch der Austausch von Körperflüssigkeiten wird hier zu einem philosophischen Akt:
I believe with every cell in my body that every cell in yours must not, must never, die, and if it does have to die, let it die inside my body.
Wichtig ist hier auch, dass die Pfirsichszene, über die alle sprechen, die den Film gesehen haben, hier wirklich eine starke Symbolkraft hat und hier auf etwas andere Art stattfindet. Ein Grund mehr, das Buch zu lesen.
Diese Liebesgeschichte ist sicherlich für alle verständlich und auch nachfühlbar, wenn man nicht gänzlich homophob ist (erste Liebe, Sehnsucht und Verlust und Schmerz). Ich finde, dass jeder sie lesen sollte. Und doch finde ich „universell“ („Coming - Of- Age- Liebesgeschichte“) etwas zu allgemein formuliert. Das wird immer gerne gesagt, um eine Geschichte aufwerten zu wollen und meint, damit ein größeres Publikum ansprechen zu können. Es ist aber auch eindeutig eine queere Geschichte und ersetzte man eine Figur durch eine Frau, würde alles gar keinen Sinn ergeben, z.B. die Spiegelung. Die Poesie dieser Geschichte wäre dahin. Verheimlichen müssen die Jungs Ihre Beziehung. Scham spielt eine Rolle, sowohl bei Elio nach dem ersten Sex mit Oliver als auch bei diesem wegen seiner Eltern, die ihn in eine Anstalt gesteckt hätten, hätten sie davon erfahren. Wenn beide sich küssen wollen, nur dann wenn keiner hinsieht. Ihre Liebe lebt gleichsam nur in einem Arkadien. Elio erzählt seinen Eltern einmal am Frühstückstisch, dass er beinahe mit einem Mädchen Sex gehabt hätte, hier spielt Scham keine Rolle.
Ich finde es ganz außerordentlich, wie ein heterosexueller Autor mann-männliches Begehren, Phantasien und Sehnsüchte in derart intensiver und erotischer Weise in Worte gefasst hat, dass ich sämtliche Gefühlszustände durchlebt habe.
We had found the stars, you and I. And this is given once only.
Llegó rápido y bien
Muy buen material y una lectura muy fácil
Es lo que esperaba mi hija
Seguiré comprando esos libros
Aciman‘s poetic prose leaves you aching for more.
Do yourself a favor and read this. (Then watch the amazing film adaptation.)






