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Jan 16, 2008

Katie rated it:

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...

1 comment like (33 people liked it)

Dec 27, 2011

Charles rated it:

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 Oliver's charm or the narrator's desirability, 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 of the More...

0 comments like (5 people liked it)

Mar 23, 2008

Michael rated it:

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...

4 comments like (11 people liked it)

Oct 23, 2011

Tancredi rated it:

"All'improvviso mi resi conto che eravamo in un tempo preso in prestito, che il tempo è sempre in prestito e che la banca che ce l'ha concesso viene a riscuotere la rata proprio quando siamo meno preparati a pagare e, anzi, ce ne servirebbe dell'altro."

Chi pensa di avere davanti l'ennesimo romanzetto adolescenziale sul più classico degli amori a scadenza, quello estivo, si sbaglia di grosso: e ben presto si ritroverà rapito incredibilmente da un romanzo che parla di tutti, More...

5 comments like (4 people liked it)

Feb 28, 2009

Libby rated it:

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...

4 comments like (12 people liked it)

Jul 29, 2011

Nancy rated it:

I found this novel painfully slow going at times. There was too much introspection, too little dialogue. The young grad student and the 17-year-old narrator annoyed me with their wishy-washy feelings and emotions. I craved more intensity and passion. Despite its flaws, I was gradually swept away by the lovely writing, the setting, and growing intimacy between the two main characters. Knowing early on these two young men were not destined to remain together did not prevent me from being deep More...

0 comments like (8 people liked it)

Nov 11, 2009

Elfscribe rated it:

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...

2 comments like (5 people liked it)

Feb 10, 2008

Karima rated it:

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...

2 comments like (4 people liked it)

Aug 02, 2007

Mo rated it:

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...

0 comments like (5 people liked it)

Jun 08, 2010

Johnos rated it:

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've never been pulled into the feelings of a character in such a vivid, detailed way, feeling that I understood exactly what the narrator was going through. This mimicks real life in that the perceptions the storyteller bases his decisions o More...

0 comments like (5 people liked it)

Nov 13, 2008

jo rated it:

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...

5 comments like (3 people liked it)

May 02, 2008

James rated it:

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...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Apr 26, 2010

Frederick rated it:

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...

2 comments like (2 people liked it)

Jan 11, 2008

Jeff rated it:

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...

5 comments like (2 people liked it)

Jan 26, 2009

Yulia rated it:

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?

2 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jul 17, 2011

Christin rated it:

Finished reading it and promptly burst into tears.

Maybe not so prompt because I could feel it in the back of my throat for the last fifty pages which I read like Oliver and Elio's trip to Rome: voracious and hoping it would never end.

ETA: Been thinking about this book a lot all week and while my original assumption was that I cried because of the missed opportunity and the heartbreak, I decided the last line (which is such a killer, I can't even read just that without t More...

0 comments like (3 people liked it)

Dec 16, 2008

Matthew rated it:

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...

1 comment like (1 person liked it)

Jun 05, 2008

Suzi rated it:

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 Aciman's More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Feb 05, 2008

Chuck rated it:

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...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Mar 31, 2008

Fernando rated it:

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...

0 comments like (3 people liked it)

May 24, 2008

Alex rated it:

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 univers More...

1 comment like (1 person liked it)

Jul 12, 2007

Jim rated it:

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 shi More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Dec 20, 2007

Randy rated it:

This book is about a 6-week infatuation (with life-long implications) between a 17 year old and a 24 year old, a scholar staying temporarily at the home on the Italian Riviera of the 17 year old's family. (Both are guys, I should add.) It's about desire vs. fear, longing vs. dread, and all of the angst, high drama, and searching for hidden meanings that accompany infatuations. I could not get into the book, though, despite the rave reviews it has received. There is very little "action" More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Feb 11, 2009

Whitaker rated it:

Aciman knows how to turn a decent phrase but this novel on young gay love is more languidly flaccid than incisively penetrating.

Written from the first-person point of view, in an almost stream of consciousness flow of words, we are plunged into Elio’s psyche as he grapples with his feelings for his family’s summer house guest, the handsome and intelligent Oliver. Aciman accurately depicts the young Elio’s state of mind, his tension of being caught precisely between longing and fear. More...

5 comments like (5 people liked it)

Jul 03, 2007

Niamh rated it:

This is a beautiful book. It reminds me of novels by Francoise Sagan, in the way that Aciman is unapologetic about writing a book devoted to the problems of decadent, wealthy, beautiful people who are lucky enough to live their lives hopping back and forth between idyllic European villages and elite American universities. For one brief moment you might think that your time would be better spent reading about something a bit more noble, but Aciman does such a wonderful job in depicting desire and More...

1 comment like (1 person liked it)

Sep 10, 2011

Tori rated it:

Literally one of the most beautiful and moving pieces of fiction I have ever read.

Favorite passage:
I wanted no secrets, no screens, nothing between us. Little did I know that if I relished the gust of candor that bound us tighter each time we swore my body is your body , it was also because I enjoyed rekindling the tiny lantern of unsuspected shame. It cast a spare glow precisely where part of me would have preferred the dark. Shame trailed instant intimacy. Could intimacy e More...

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Sep 01, 2011

Yvonne rated it:

This is an undeniably beautifully written book with sentences that goes on for days. But this story of two young men, 17 year old Elio & 24 year old Oliver, who discover a passion for each other & others, during one 6 week summer spent together in the Riviera has, in the end, a tragic air about it that's somewhat baffling. They are both beautiful, wealthy, over educated (maybe that's the problem) young men with no real opposition coming from anyone to the two of them being together. They separa More...

3 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jun 25, 2011

Sharpobserver rated it:

I first devoured this book a year ago and it remains a kind of vivid parallel universe of my mind like the sort Oliver talks about in the last part of the story. The setting and all the sensual aspects of the writing, plus the love story and the personalities, have created a very comfortable little spot in my memory.. always open for daydreaming.

After a year I am surprised to say that it is Chapter Three, Rome, which twinkles brightest in my mind. At the time I felt cheated by i More...

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Jun 11, 2011

Lisabet rated it:

Erotica is the literature of desire, both unrequited and consummated. This might be a critical distinction between erotica and pornography (if one were motivated to define such a distinction): in pornography, desire is rarely unconsummated for long. By contrast, in Andre Aciman's novel CALL ME BY YOUR NAME, teenaged Elio suffers in the throes of unspoken, unbearable and unsatisfied desire for the entire first half of the book. The resulting erotic tension is so acute that the reader practically More...

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May 30, 2010

AdultFiction rated it:

Teton County Library Call No: F ACIMAN
Susannah Broyles's Rating: 4 Stars

Have you ever been in love? No not that kid you married in kindergarten with a ring out of a cereal box, but the first time you fell in love. Again not rainbows, puppies and shared milkshakes on a pier, but rather the self-doubt, awkwardness, and all the confusing mixtures of emotions that plagues you from the moment you when you meet that other person. This is the side of love that takes precedent in Andr More...

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