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Call Me by Your Name

by Andre Aciman

ISBN13: 9780374299217
ISBN10: 0374299218
Condition: Standard
Dustjacket: Standard
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Synopses & Reviews

Publisher Comments:

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 spirits is 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.

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." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

Review:

"If you have ever been the willing victim of obsessive love — a force greater than yourself that pulls you inextricably toward the object of your desire — you will recognize every nuance of Andre Aciman's superb new novel, 'Call Me by Your Name.'

The story unfolds in the spacious home of an academic who hosts a new student every year on the Italian coast, near Genoa. One summer's visitor... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) is a charming 24-year-old American named Oliver, the kind of person for whom everything seems effortless: 'He was okay with being Jewish ... He was okay with his body, with his looks, with his antic backhand, with his choice of books, music, films, friends.' The servants are as beguiled by him as the professor and his wife. Only one member of the household is paralyzed by his arrival: the professor's 17-year-old son, Elio.

This boy is also the book's precocious narrator, and he is quick to recognize the nature of his predicament: 'I was afraid when (Oliver) showed up, afraid when he failed to, afraid when he looked at me, more frightened yet when he didn't.' Elio immediately decides that he and Oliver are soul brothers: '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.' But he is tormented by the mystery of exactly where their connection will lead them — and the reader quickly comes to share the intensity of his curiosity.

Like so many classic love stories, this one unfolds with the suspense of a thriller. Will Elio's passion ever be reciprocated by the one he worships? If it is, will they leap over fear and taboo to consummate their desire? And if they do, will they be exhilarated or repelled by that consummation? They have only six weeks to find out.

The boys' stratagems of avoidance and entrapment (often indistinguishable from each other) unfold inside an exceptionally literate household. Aciman has perfect pitch for everything from the beauty of the languid Italian countryside to the perils of unbridled adolescent passion: 'I wanted him dead ... so that if I couldn't stop thinking about him and worrying about when would be the next time I'd see him, at least his death would put an end to it. I wanted to kill him myself, even, so as to let him know how much his mere existence had come to bother me ... I didn't know what I was afraid of, nor why I worried so much, nor why this thing that could so easily cause panic felt like hope sometimes and, like hope in the darkest moments, brought such joy, unreal joy, joy with a noose tied around it.'

At the dinner table, the boys compete to hide their passion beneath their erudition. The conversation ranges from an explanation of Haydn's 'Seven Last Words of Christ' to the etymology of the word 'apricot.'

The book is explicit without ever being prurient, and the feelings the narrator describes are both homoerotic and universal: 'Are `being" and `having" thoroughly inaccurate verbs in the twisted skein of desire, where having someone's body to touch and being that someone we're longing to touch are one and the same, just opposite banks on a river that passes from us to them, back to us and over to them again this perpetual circulation where the chambers of the heart, like the trapdoors of desire, and the wormholes of time, and the false-bottomed drawer we call identity share a beguiling logic according to which the shortest distance between real life and the life unlived, between who we are and what we want, is a twisted staircase designed with the impish cruelty of M.C. Escher ... He was my secret conduit to myself — like a catalyst that allows us to become who we are, the foreign body, the pacer, the graft, the patch that sends all the right impulses, the steel pin that keeps a soldier's bone together, the other man's heart that makes us more us than we were before the transplant.'

Almost 60 years ago, Gore Vidal published 'The City and the Pillar.' Although Vidal has always eschewed the word, the novel's characters advanced the argument that 'gay' describes an act rather than a person. The protagonists of Aciman's novel do that more convincingly that anyone Vidal ever created. The beauty of Aciman's writing and the purity of his passions should place this extraordinary first novel within the canon of great romantic love stories for everyone.

" Reviewed by Charles Kaiser, author of 'The Gay Metropolis,' which will be published in an updated edition this summer, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
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Synopsis:

This heartrending elegy to human passion is the story of a sudden and powerful romance that blossoms between an adolescent boy and a summer guest at his parents' house, a cliffside mansion on the Italian Riviera.

About the Author

André Aciman is the author of Out of Egypt (FSG, 1995) and False Papers (FSG, 2000), and the editor of The Proust Project (FSG, 2004). He teaches comparative literature at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He lives with his family in Manhattan.

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: Grady Harp, February 6, 2008 (view all comments by Grady Harp)
Reflections on a Summer of Love

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
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: Mikeonalpha, February 17, 2007 (view all comments by Mikeonalpha)
"I look back on those days and regret none of it, not the risks, not the shame, not the total lack of foresight..." says the central protagonist of Andre Aciman's stunning novel of sexual obsession and love. Call Me by Your Name is really an astounding piece of writing, substantial and quite beautiful, the voluminous pages filled with constant references to literature, history and mythology.

Seventeen-year-old Elio lives on the Italian Riviera with his wealthy and academically minded parents. He indeed seems to live a charmed life, his days filled with swimming, reading, seaside walks, and playing tennis. Companionable, but with an almost constant need for attention, Elio has an obvious artistic bent and is well and truly grounded in music, literature and art.

Every summer for the past fifteen years, his parents have been playing host to a college student, their youthful guest being their way of helping young academics revise their budding manuscripts before publication. Throughout these months, they usually become part of the family and are given full run the house to do whatever they pleased.

This summer in particular is marked by the arrival of the twenty-five year-old Olivier, a suavely attractive and masculine American who oozes self-confidence and who immediately enchants Elio's parents by his one word send off, always brisk, bold and blunted: "later." Elio is not quite sure when the attraction starts, maybe it begins soon after Olivier's arrival during one of those "grinding lunches" when he sits next to Elio, or perhaps it starts on the beach, or even at the tennis court.

One thing is for sure, one event eventually leads to another, and Elio finds himself falling in lust with Olivier. Within two weeks, Elio begins to obsess, his teenage hormones and imagination running rampant as he fantasizes about every night, for Olivier just to leave his room, "not via the front door, but through the French windows on the balcony, and "to work his way into my body, gently and softly."

Although one realizes from the outset, that the longing will be eventually consummated, the inevitable coupling between Olivier and Elio is still seen as raw and indeed shocking, and is filled with a kind of brutal and wicked sensuality. The obsession continues and Elio starts to run the gamut of emotions from fear, to hunger, to ecstasy and then on to remorse, the "twisted into sudden pangs of guilt... shame trailed instant intimacy."

Spinning through Elio's lustful world, both he and Oliver dance an intricate ballet of courtship. At first, Olivier is standoffish, whilst Elio sees the older man as powerfully sexual, but also thoroughly alert and cold and a fully sagacious judge of character and situations - nothing he does or says is unpremeditated, "he sees through everybody."

Filtered though Elio's point of view and also deeply reflective, much of the action is driven by the titular boy's own inner dialog. He becomes convinced that no one in the world wants Olivier as physically as he does. He yearns for Olivier during the morning ritual after breakfast, whilst they are lying on the grass, or by the pool, or then swimming or jogging, " the afternoon hours, splendid and lush with abundant sun and silence..."

In this deeply evocative story, the author writes of the sexual side of human nature, where lust oozes from every corner, giving no quarter, indeed even Elio is somewhat shocked at his attraction to another man, and also about this "twisted skein of desire," where having someone's body to touch and being that someone longing to touch are one and the same.

Can intimacy endure once indecency is spent and our bodies run out of tricks? Aciman certainly thinks so as he charts Elio and Olivier's passionate relationship, as it eventually becomes a veil of love, culminating in a romantic kiss in Rome, where after a wondrous dinner and a poetry reading, Olivier presses Elio hard against the wall on via Santa Maria dell' Anima.

Although time and the years do eventually separate them, and all that remains is dream making and a strange type of remembrance, their love is forever preserved, eternally cemented by the extraordinary hand of fate. Mike Leonard February 07.
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: shoppingforstuff, February 10, 2007 (view all comments by shoppingforstuff)
It was obvious that the author is not gay. The protagonist's internal dialogue did not seem authentic -- e.g., he seemed too sexually charged/satisfied with sexual relationships with women. Also, he was extraordinarily neurotic.

I felt some of the situations described in the novel were odd and disturbing and did not add any real value -- e.g., the bodily excretion scene between the two leads.

Oliver's character was not fully developed. Here was a handsome, charming, gadfly man who is described as being able to have anyone he pleases and is somehow inexplicitly attracted to this neurotic, shy, boy. The relationship between the two felt like Elio had an unhealthy fixation rather than a mutually-shared affection.

Many times I felt the author was trying to impress the reader with his vocabulary than tell a story -- i.e., use a "big" word when a "small" word would have been satisfactory.

Finally, it was a variation of a story we've seen/read many times before -- the emotionally immature, lonely, and lost gay boy who is still emotionally-stunted, lonely, and lost as an adult -- Oliver's character gets to grow up, but Elio doesn't.

All that being said, it was emotionally moving -- not so much because of the writing, but because of the loss and loneliness of the lead character as well as him never being able to move on or find love as an adult.

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Product Details

ISBN:: 9780374299217
Author:: Aciman, Andre
Publisher:: Farrar Straus Giroux
Subject:: General
Subject:: Authors
Subject:: Gay
Subject:: Teenage boys
Subject:: General Fiction
Subject:: Literary
Subject:: Italy
Subject:: Love stories
Publication Date:: January 2007
Binding:: Hardcover
Language:: English
Pages:: 248
Dimensions:: 8.61x5.76x.87 in. .88 lbs.

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