Call Me by Your Name: A Novel (Paperback) by Andre Aciman - Reviews, Discussion, Bookclubs, Lists

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Gay fiction/non-f...: * Introduce Yourself	184	356	2 days ago, 08:24PM
Loved it!	1	9	04/17/2009 08:16AM

01/14/08

Katie rated it:

Read in January, 2008

I wanted to make fun of this maddening book, but really, I must just want to make fun of myself for loving it. The bare bones of the story could have been assembled using some kind of Gay Coming of Age Novel Trope Generator. Teenager. Grad student. Italian beach. Fruit. Poetry. Jealousy. Sex. Loss. More poetry.

But. I agree with whoever likens Aciman's approach to Proust's (which is probably everybody who has read both Aciman and Proust.) This is not a Gay Coming of Age N...more I wanted to make fun of this maddening book, but really, I must just want to make fun of myself for loving it. The bare bones of the story could have been assembled using some kind of Gay Coming of Age Novel Trope Generator. Teenager. Grad student. Italian beach. Fruit. Poetry. Jealousy. Sex. Loss. More poetry.

But. I agree with whoever likens Aciman's approach to Proust's (which is probably everybody who has read both Aciman and Proust.) This is not a Gay Coming of Age Novel, at all; it's an elegy for desire, for memory itself; and it manages to visit that interior terrain of longing most notably visited by A LA RECHERCHE DU TEMPS PERDU, without begging a side-by-side comparison. (Which is a feat in itself. What novelist could really survive a direct comparison to Proust? Best to avoid it.)

The frustrations of the novel only become apparent once the spell of Aciman's spare but lovely prose has been broken. While reading it, I never thought to sneer at the clichés, or at the problems of a seventeen year old child of wealthy intellectuals. I was too entranced by the salt breezes and the sunlit stones, and the daily rituals of swimming, breakfast, dissertation work, coffee, dinner guests, town, bed, and the millions of specific new shades of pain that result from each and every moment spent around, and away from, the narrator's object of desire. There are some story frustrations here, to be sure, but from this book, I was only expecting a bit of light escapism for my subway ride. My expectations were so successfully shattered, it was almost uncomfortable to read it in public.

"This novel is hot," wrote NYT reviewer Stacey D'Erasmo. Hell, yes. The heat here is not the heat of sex acts, however, (though there is that) but the heat of an ever-building, single-minded, raw-gutted longing, and the pain of remembering it. The heat is the agony of obsession, when any solitary glance or casual exchange can be sharpened with two, three, ten edges of conflicting meaning.

I don't know that I've ever read a book so relentlessly accurate in its detailing of each precise doubt and hope, but mostly doubt, that colors any interaction or lack of interaction with the object of one's desire. These precise doubts are separated out and distilled purely and tightly and lucidly by Aciman. He just does not let up. This was the great surprise of CALL ME BY YOUR NAME, for me. As much as I thought I'd want to throw this book down at times, I almost missed my stop because it would not let me go.

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03/10/08

Michael rated it:

Read in March, 2008

Page after claustrophobic page, reading Call Me By Your Name felt a bit like trying to fall asleep with the covers pulled completely over my head -- creating a warmer, humid, slightly uncomfortable place -- because the bedroom's a bit chilly and immersed within bed covers is, despite a distinct lack of space around the body, the head, the mouth, the best place to be.

I could never fully separate from the narrator, this 17 year old kid Elio consumed by his first serious feelings for a...more Page after claustrophobic page, reading Call Me By Your Name felt a bit like trying to fall asleep with the covers pulled completely over my head -- creating a warmer, humid, slightly uncomfortable place -- because the bedroom's a bit chilly and immersed within bed covers is, despite a distinct lack of space around the body, the head, the mouth, the best place to be.

I could never fully separate from the narrator, this 17 year old kid Elio consumed by his first serious feelings for another human being -- feelings that I don't believe the writer Andre Aciman ever calls love in the novel. Of course, he never needs to. The emotion is branded into every word, every sentence, from page one to the final lines. Say a blind person could suddenly see. It's difficult to explain the fact of a circle without simply drawing one on a page and pointing. So goes love. So goes this story. It simply is, and defies rote characterization.

It's also more than the sum of its parts. And please forgive the familiar tropes, found in so much gay literature, that are found here as well. While one could label this novel as quintessentially European obsessive melodrama and little more, with lots of pretty, convoluted sentences that add up to something less than the profundity the author intends, it's impossible to deny the mood this book creates as the pages wear on. It begins to inhabit. I felt the lonely crevasses in my mind fill up, my heart's chambers swell as I sunk into the marrow of Elio and Oliver's love story.

I couldn't deny that at points in my life I was the narrator. And while this wasn't always a pleasant place to be, as I recalled past loves (lives?) long lost, I couldn't deny some slight comfort sharing the same pain (and joy) that Elio felt, that I felt, and that I know someone else was feeling at the very same moment reading this book or another, in different town, state or country, each of us feeling that tightening of heart in chest that says yes, I know this ache, I know its name, and despite myself, I can't stop reading. (less)

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03/28/08

Libby rated it:

(review of isbn 0374299218)

bookshelves: thesis-book-list

Read in January, 2009

I've been roaming around for weeks now, proselytizing to any and all who will listen, on behalf of this novel. Call My by Your Name completely gutted me. I haven't read a novel that so powerfully affected me in a very long time.

There are many fine, nuanced, wonderful reviews of the book up here already, so I'll just touch on one aspect of the novel that I found particularly surprising in its acuity of vision and the precision of its rendering, beyond its portrait of desire: Elio's ha...more I've been roaming around for weeks now, proselytizing to any and all who will listen, on behalf of this novel. Call My by Your Name completely gutted me. I haven't read a novel that so powerfully affected me in a very long time.

There are many fine, nuanced, wonderful reviews of the book up here already, so I'll just touch on one aspect of the novel that I found particularly surprising in its acuity of vision and the precision of its rendering, beyond its portrait of desire: Elio's habit of projecting himself imaginatively into the future. We learn repeatedly that Elio often makes choices that are predicated on how he imagines he'll feel looking back on said choices. I don't mean how he'll feel about those choices in a moral sense, but more, how by making a choice he can simultaneously bring into being the adult he one day wants to be via his present actions while also satisfying that imagined adult. How he imagines providing the imagined adult with the emotional experience befitting that future person who is him. So that the imagining and the realizing of the imagined person are bound together. I think this is one of the great magics of adolescence--that you know that you're going to leave, that you're going to molt, that this little space you're carving out in time is by necessity fleeting, ephemeral, so that maybe for one of the only times you're looking forward almost to the exclusion of anything else. No one needs to warn you don't look back, because you're so intent on trying to see who you're going to be. I remember so well making exactly those maneuvers, doing things to become my imagined future self and also, doing them for my future self, so that she might be able to feel what I imagined she should feel if she turned out to be anything like the person I hoped (results so far are mixed). God, teenagers are supreme time-travelers.

And I suppose that whole imagined self/projected self is very much bound to desire (how could it not be, of course, of course) in that by loving someone we tell ourselves what kind of person we are; we choose ourselves by choosing an other in that our projections of that person--what makes them desirous to us--is so much a reflection of how we want to see ourselves, how we want to be seen, of the qualities we tell ourselves are essential to being in the world. And because that imagined self is absent--the future isn't here--and desire requires absence, or at least a premonition of absence, the absent imagined self is pure desire.

That's in part what makes reading this novel, even at its happiest, especially at its happiest, so wrenching. The absence. We know, by the fact of its narration, that absence is at its center.

My only regret is that I read part of this book on the bus--the number two bus (if anyone from Minneapolis happens to read this, they'll know what I mean), during rush hour. Yes, the book is sexy, and yes, it was a little awkward reading super hot graphic sex scenes while sitting next to a woman in a full length hijab, but mostly it was horrible reading something so devastating in public. I totally cried on the bus, but I wanted to sob.

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02/09/08

Elfscribe rated it:

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Read in February, 2008

I've just read one of those rare books that just pierces your heart with aching beauty and the richness, pain, and passion of the human experience. "Call Me By Your Name" by Andre Aciman is about a 17 year old Italian boy named Elio who falls for another young man, an American scholar just out of college, who comes to his house for 6 weeks to work with Elio's father on a book. It is an unusual household, full of talented, erudite people and young Elio is also extraordinary for his mus...more I've just read one of those rare books that just pierces your heart with aching beauty and the richness, pain, and passion of the human experience. "Call Me By Your Name" by Andre Aciman is about a 17 year old Italian boy named Elio who falls for another young man, an American scholar just out of college, who comes to his house for 6 weeks to work with Elio's father on a book. It is an unusual household, full of talented, erudite people and young Elio is also extraordinary for his musical gifts, intelligence, and sensitivity. He meets his match in the charming, brilliant Oliver, who captivates Elio's whole family. For Elio, he becomes an obsession, someone you long for so hard that he dominates every waking moment, who you want to possess because you so want to be that other person. For a good part of the summer, Elio, wise beyond his years in some ways, painfully young in others, dances around Oliver, not daring to admit his attraction. He lies awake at night imagining the possibilities that eventually become reality. The book is written from a perspective of someone much later in life, reminiscing about a pivotal moment in his youth when he met his soul mate. It beautifully captures the passion of sexual awakening as well as about learning to love oneself through another. This book will just wound you with its poetic words, its passion, and its unflinching look at understanding the truth of one's heart.

So here are a couple of passages from a book in which every word is beautiful:

"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."

"You can always talk to me. I was your age once, my father used to say. The things you feel and think only you have felt, believe me, I've lived and suffered through all of them . . . yet I know almost every bend, every tollbooth, every chamber in the human heart."

"The word "friendship" came to mind. But friendship, as defined by everyone, was alien, fallow stuff I cared nothing for. What I may have wanted instead, from the moment he stepped out of the cab to our farewell in Rome, was what all humans ask of one another, what makes life livable . . .

" . . . I began to wonder what all this talk of San Clemente had to do with us - how we move through time, how time moves through us, how we change and keep changing, and come back to the same. One could even grow old and not learn a thing but this. . . . All that remains is dreammaking and strange remembrance."

There are many jewels of understanding in this book, I can't recommend it enough, especially for writers, and more especially for writers interested in a marvelously sensitive portrayal of m/m love. But even beyond that, it is a portrayal of our very human desire to connect in a deep way with another soul, regardless of that person's gender. (less)

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01/22/08

Karima rated it:

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bookshelves: previouslyread

Read in January, 2008

recommended to Karima by: Sandra
recommends it for: poetic types; lovers of beauty

Just put this book down with an audible,"aaahhhh...." It's the kind of experience one needs to sit with for a bit, very still, before moving on to something else and breaking the spell.
Debated with myself about giving it 3 or 4 stars and settled on 3 due to too much meandering and too many predictable outcomes.
HOWEVER, at times (many) it was breathtaking and almost unbearable in its white-knuckled yearnings. Also loved that the author used beautiful words like "sough."...more

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01/03/08

Philip rated it:

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Read in January, 2008

recommended to Philip by: david chapman
recommends it for: shameless romantics

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.

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08/02/07

Mo Johnston rated it:

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Has a copy to sell/swap — Read in July, 2007

About the precocious teenage son of expatriot professors who summer on the Amalfi coast and drink Grappa while the kid studies Handel and Bach; a hot grad student from Columbia comes to spend the summer and work on his thesis. Things go from bad to worse. I stopped reading when the writer spent 10 pages comparing the grad student's ass to a peach. The last 60 pages I skimmed just to find out the ending (SPOILER: their love affair is fleeting, but both become hot 40 year-olds with promising acade...more

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09/18/08

jo rated it:

(review of isbn 0374299218)

bookshelves: africa, im-emigration-colonial, queer

Read in November, 2008

i was entirely captured by the first two sections of this book. unlike my good friend jeff, i found myself totally taken by pretty boys writing books and talking music and philosophy in a villa on the italian riviera in the middle of the mediterranean summer. maybe it's because i know the mediterranean summer, though i have never spent it on the riviera or, for that matter, in a villa. there's some scott fitzgerald that takes place in a similar environs, and i dare same some hemingway. i thought...more i was entirely captured by the first two sections of this book. unlike my good friend jeff, i found myself totally taken by pretty boys writing books and talking music and philosophy in a villa on the italian riviera in the middle of the mediterranean summer. maybe it's because i know the mediterranean summer, though i have never spent it on the riviera or, for that matter, in a villa. there's some scott fitzgerald that takes place in a similar environs, and i dare same some hemingway. i thought i had had enough of decadent descriptions of life on the riviera in the summer, but nope, i hadn't and haven't.

this is all foil. the real story is the depiction of unbearable adolescent longing and lust, mixed with guilt, self-hatred, impossibility, and an overwhelming sense of doom. i found the subtle description of the tiny nuances of these complex feelings riveting, pitch-perfect, and heartbreaking (because, let's face it, none of us ever entirely outgrows his or her adolescence, the same as we never outgrow our childhood: rather, we pile all these former selves inside us, perching the adult precariously on top).

i lost interest, instead, when the novel moved into the third part. but this is probably me. after all that skin and sun, nighttime rome felt contrived to me. it is also more difficult to describe perfect happiness than perfect misery, and less interesting to read about it.

i would like to mention the fact that, to the best of my judgement, this egyptian author makes his protagonist italian (yes?), and that both lovers are jewish, one sephardic the other one presumably ashkenazi (aciman is himself a sephardic jew). quite a bit is made of the jewishness at the beginning; later, though, it gets dropped out of the novel. since the beginning is the part in which longing and loss are most prominent, this seems significant to me. elio's isolation (he doesn't have any friends, he spends all day alone with is music, his parents are worried about him, he is not much interested in girls) is a mixture of gayness, overcultivation (at some point oliver asks him, "do you know everything?" and, truly, he does!), and jewishness.

equally intriguing, in the same melancholy and doomed way, is the little girl vimimi (what kind of name is that???), who lives with her leukemia and her certain death like a top-notch stoic.

*** SPOILER ***

i'm angry at this book for the violence it consciously does to one's heart strings, and i'm particularly angry at the very last part, in which the description of failed lives made out of missed chances reaches a truly tragic pitch. but the first part, with all the sun and the lust, with the uncertainty and the despair and the intolerable longing, with the blind heartache that hits kids who haven't yet gotten used to life, that spoke to me.(less)

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04/02/08

James rated it:

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bookshelves: fiction

Read in May, 2008

The first 60-ish pages are so exciting; I love the way the narrator (Elio) analyzes his thoughts and feelings. The writing is daring, the kind of writing I wish I had written.

But the rest of the book doesn't excite me. It's another love-that-cannot-last story. Yes, there are a few beautiful moments. But too many questions remain, mainly: what keeps them apart? The world in which their relationship develops has few limits. They only have a few weeks together, but during that time, the...more

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06/06/07

Frederick rated it:

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bookshelves: aciman, lgbt, novels

Read in February, 2007

recommends it for: Readers of gay literature

This is one of the most well-written novels I've ever read. Certainly the author has studied Proust. I thought as much as I read it. After finishing I read the flaps and discovered the author is a founder of a Proust society. It is not a very long novel, nor is it about an entire society. But its focus on the dynamic between two people is, indeed, in the manner of Proust.
This is very much about seduction. Although it is largely about seduction by, and not of, the innocent, it is, indeed, a...more

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04/06/08

John rated it:

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Read in May, 2008

Just as no two authors would approach the same story in exactly the same way, no two readers will be stirred in the same way from their story. Or, maybe I assume wrongly that most people bring their own personal experience with them as they read a story (I identify with this character? How could this one be such a shithead?) Anyway, for me, at this moment in my life, this was one of the best books I've read. I've never been pulled into the feelings of the character in such a vivid, d...more

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12/18/07

Jeff rated it:

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Read in January, 2008

recommends it for: gay and queer-friendly bibliophiles

This is a well-written though somewhat familiar queer coming-of-age novel in the stylistic tradition of Henry James, Thomas Mann, and (more overtly) Edmund White. I did find the final chapters, which focus more on the inability to recapture the past and the great sense of loss that clouds over such desire, to be the most engaging section. There was also a lovely scene between the central character and his father that stands out. Still, its a challenge to get excited about pretty people living in...more

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05/25/08

Yulia rated it:

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bookshelves: gay-lit

Read in June, 2008

A father to his 17-year-old son:

"Right now you may not want to feel anything. Perhaps you never wished to feel anything. And perhaps it's not with me that you'll want to speak about these things. But feel something you did" (p. 224).

Hmm, I'm not sure what to make of this now. Poignant? Corny? Implausible? All of the above?

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04/05/09

Charles rated it:

Read in May, 2009

I'm in two minds about this book. I found it a lot of it self-indulgent, sub-Brodkeyean word playing, without any of the emotional charge and depth that Brodkey provides. I had no sense of the Oliver's charm or the narrator's desireability, and I found their sexual flip-flopping deeply unconvincing. I also find it hard to believe that any bookseller with an ounce of sense would organise a poetry reading in Rome in August. Having said all that, I did read it to the end and was left with a sense o...more

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12/04/08

Matthew rated it:

bookshelves: all-time-favorites, gay-fiction

Read in December, 2008

What an incredible novel! Aciman is, perhaps not surprisingly, a leading Proust scholar, and the book is very much in search of lost time or, to use another translation of Proust's, a remembrance of things past. I include both translations because each says something different, and I think both apply to Aciman's novel, which gives to its readers the most eloquent, most evocative, most literate narrator I've met in quite some time.

On the surface, the story is simple: a summer love bet...more What an incredible novel! Aciman is, perhaps not surprisingly, a leading Proust scholar, and the book is very much in search of lost time or, to use another translation of Proust's, a remembrance of things past. I include both translations because each says something different, and I think both apply to Aciman's novel, which gives to its readers the most eloquent, most evocative, most literate narrator I've met in quite some time.

On the surface, the story is simple: a summer love between an American graduate student and a young Italian man, doomed to fail as all summer loves are. Yet the novel itself is more about the memory of the love affair, and even more pointedly about the remembering of it, than it is about the love affair itself.

As may be expected of a Proustian scholar, Aciman writes a novel that studies the mind more than the events. CALL ME BY YOUR NAME is quite possibly the most introspective, most studying, most percolating novel I've yet read, and what luck that it's about an obsessive love affair! (I hate the word 'obsessive,' due to its negative 'stalkerish' connotations, but I cannot think of another word that describes the sort of all-encompassing, worshiping, consuming type of love between Oliver and Elio.) Perhaps my true passion for this novel lies in the fact that I, too, spend quite a lot of time thinking about my past loves, and as I read Elio's words, his reactions, his thoughts, I matched them point-for-point to my own words and reactions and thoughts. Aciman has managed to put into words the feelings we experience as we love, which, as anybody who has ever loved before understands, is not an easy task.

I feel as if I haven't said enough about Aciman's style, which is eloquent, graceful, literate, beautiful. This is truly literature, not fiction. High diction, complex syntax, extensive (though not excessive) figurative language. What is truly amazing is that this style, when analyzed outside of the moment of reading, seems overbearing, overdone, overwrought -- just over -- and yet as you read, everything is perfect, nothing should or even could be done in a different way. And that is the mark of a truly great novelist.

I'm rather depressed to find that this is, to date, the only novel of Aciman's, and I wait, rather impatiently, for his next.(less)

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06/05/08

Suzi rated it:

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From the here:

Bookslut.com says, "The hardest part of writing a review for André Aciman's powerful first novel, Call Me By Your Name, is trying not to turn it into a love letter to the author." Well, consider that challenge already lost. I'll just say it: I don't know you, André Aciman, but I adore your writing. Another reviewer says, "Call Me By Your Name may prove to be the beautiful book of 2007. That is the first and only important thing to say about André Acima...more

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02/05/08

Chuck Adams rated it:

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Read in December, 2007

I had read some great reviews of this novel before starting it, and I was immediately disappointed. Despite some beautiful writing, I felt the story was going nowhere. I read 50 pages and put it aside. Then two people whose taste I respect talked about how deeply this novel had affected them, and told me I had to go back to it, and so I did. They were right: the emotional payoff was, for me, amazing. The problem at the start of the novel may have been solely mine--I tend to want a story to get g...more

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10/20/07

Fernando rated it:

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Read in March, 2008

recommends it for: everyone

This is going to be my very first review here on Goodreads since I can't help but stew over that which I've gained from this book. I'll not go too far but wanted to say it's certainly worthy of a slow, meaningful read for anyone. I can also say that it is interesting to note that this is a story written by a straight man about longing and obsession that just happens to be between two men.

I immediately went back to reread the last section to really take it in and will likely read th...more

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05/18/08

Alex Middleton rated it:

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I cannot reccommend this book enough! full of raw emotion and more than once hit the spot where i felt like ive gone through many of the emotion described in this book!
Aciman's 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 uni...more

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07/12/07

Jim Coughenour rated it:

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bookshelves: memoir

Read in March, 2007

I found this deliberately beautiful book a bit taxing. Aciman has absorbed Proust through every pore; at points I feared it had poisoned him. The 17-year-old narrator is (too) precocious and privileged, and he takes far too long to yield to his exquisite (and endlessly articulated) whorls of desire. The first third of the book glows with a kind of magic; the middle achieves an almost unbearable statis — but stay with it! — because the last third is luminous. The long scene set in Rome, which...more

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