Call Me By Your Name by André Aciman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
(This review was originally posted on Goodreads in 2021, read in 2017, 2018 and 2021):
“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.”
This is a book of all-consuming obsession, sensual to the point that is feels uncomfortable to read at parts, to the point that you feel voyeristic for just sharing those very intimate emotions with Elio and really want to look away, to allow for a semblance of privacy.
“He came. He left. Nothing else had changed. I had not changed. The world hadn’t changed. Yet nothing would be the same. All that remains is dreammaking and strange remembrance.”
Everything is intense, sensual, overpowering, intoxicating — the thoughts, the smells, the imagery. The oppressive summer heat, the minutiae of the languorous sun-bathed days, the overpowering longing for someone – that someone who is forever etched into the very fibers of your heart. The excruciating intensity with which Elio turns even the smallest things, the tiniest details, over and over in his feverish mind. Perfect clarity and anguished confusion coexisting often in the same sentence, same thought. The desire – no, the sheer need – to be with someone so much that you can meld into the same person, inhabit each other’s body and mind, forget in this confusion where you end and the other begins.
“Did I want to be like him? Did I want to be him? Or did I just want to have him? Or 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 in this perpetual circuit where the chambers of the heart, like the trapdoors of desire, and the wormholes of time[…]”
I remember being young like Elio, young and wearing my heart on my sleeve. From the distance of time I recall how intense everything seemed – and was. How strong and overpowering and at times surreal emotions felt. How all-consuming and pleasantly suffocating love and obsession seemed. How raw the feelings were. How dramatic things seemed. How pain and joy seemed to coexist and both could feel like they could kill you in an instant.
“Cor cordium, heart of hearts, I’ve never said anything truer in my life to anyone.”
Maybe you need to have experienced that kind of overwhelming obsession, overpowering infatuation with another person to really feel this story, to recognize – at times almost shamefully – that all-encompassing obsession, the need taking over your whole being.
I doubt that it will appeal to many young people, those closer to Elio’s age than his father’s age. I think the pull of nostalgia for the intense feelings of early youth is part of the strength of this story — and you need some temporal distance for the nostalgia to feel real. There a reason why a man two decades older than his seventeen-year-old remembered self is telling us the story of that lazy Italian summer and the deep impact it had on his entire life.
“Time makes us sentimental. Perhaps, in the end, it is because of time that we suffer.”
Aciman does not shy away from uncomfortable. There are a few scenes so personal that they made me cringe, and yet within the framework of this book — where soul and desires and the darkest and deepest urges are longings are all laid bare — they fit.
Listen to it, superbly narrated by Armie Hammer whose voice adds to the magnetic pull of the words, who portrays a perfect Elio – and then, just as these young men longed for, becomes Oliver in the film. (Also, say what you want about that film – but that scene of Oliver goofily and unselfconsciously dancing while Elio darkly watches him gets nothing but pure love from me).
4.5 stars.
“We had the stars, you and I. And this is given once only.”
books are life 