I hadn't a hope left. And maybe I stared back because there wasn't a thing to lose now. I stared back with the all-knowing, I-dare-you-to-kiss-me gaze of someone who both challenges and flees with one and the same gesture.

I can't find again the Jean Rhys line in one of her short stories that the hopeless are more sincere. It stuck out to me and I read a few of the stories again (well worth the time, anyway) trying to find it. Oh, well. I agree with this if it means that if it comes from a place 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 el More...

[Disclaimer: contains some swearing. Mild spoilers too.]

See, the problem with this book is that, for all its clever prose, it finds itself, like so much 'high-brow' queer fiction, unable to escape the 'GAY MEANS MISERY' trap.

Why? Who actually reads a miserable ending and feels vindicated? Who would want to read yet another book that buys into the myth that if you're queer, no matter how good things seem at present, you're doomed to unhappiness and eventual abandonment?

Again, why? It's just such More...

“Chiamami col tuo nome” è un lungo canto d’amore in prima persona. L’oggetto del canto è un amore che potremmo definire estivo, ma sbaglieremmo, perché in realtà è l’amore di una vita.

Nella prima parte Elio racconta di quell’estate in cui Oliver scese dal taxi ed entrò in casa sua. Elio 17 anni, adolescente atipico, sensibile musicista e amante della letteratura. Oliver 24 anni, ricercatore universitario americano, bello, affascinante, piace a tutti. Elio si domanda quando tutto sia iniziato. Ri More...

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...

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 More...

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 tearing up) is about some More...

"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, a tutti. Chiamami col More...

"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 the soldier's bone together, the other man's heart that makes us more us than we were before the transplant."

I saw someone call this book 'maddening', I think I'd like to second that. I never expected it to get under my skin like it's done. And I certainly never expected to read scenes that ought t 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 proje More...

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 deeply mo 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, More...

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."
Here's a snippet from p. 28 More...

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...

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 on a More...

Pesona buku ini layaknya sebuah simfoni: maksud dari keindahannya baru dapat kita pahami setelah kita mencerap keseluruhannya. Cinta Terlarang berjalan dengan tempo yang lamban. Ketika membacanya, saya berkali-kali tergoda untuk meletakkan buku ini dan berhenti. Namun, Tn. Aciman rupanya memang pencerita unggul. Selalu ada sesuatu yang membuat saya terus melanjutkan: panasnya cinta muda, pengakuan diri (akan seksualitas), haus asmara, adegan percintaan yang gamblang, animalistik namun tetap mesr 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 More...

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, they can come a More...

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, also ab More...

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...

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?

I cried throughout almost all of the ending pages and on the very last page I conveniently burst into sobs. This book is amazingly beautiful, and has got under my skin like no other book has ever quite managed to do so in this way. It's so darn powerful I can't even comprehend the idea of writing a review to fully compact all of my thoughts and feelings because I can't even articulate them myself. There is this sense of lust and absence at the heart of this novel and so beautifully is it describ 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 Amer More...

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 this book severa More...

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 university. O More...

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...

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. Ultimately, More...

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...

I stumbled across this book after finishing Michael Cunningham's "A Home at the End of the World". I think comparing the two was a bad idea as I was left underwhelmed with André Aciman's novel.

That being said, the book offered a very strong beginning. I quickly became involved with the main character and his new obsession. A boy who moved from the United States to continue his studies in Italy while living with his family. I use the word obsession here, because that is what it really is. At firs More...

Andre Aciman's CALL ME BY YOUR NAME (Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2007) is a short but unforgettable novel about a brief love affair between two young men, ages 17 and 24, who previously had heterosexual histories. Whether Elio and Oliver are straight or gay is a matter of opinion; I was reminded of Gore Vidal's shrewd and thought-provoking remark that words such as homosexual or heterosexual are properly adjectives, not nouns; they refer to relationships, emotions, acts, not to people.

Set on More...