false 4 7 false false Sun Mar 23 00:00:00 -0700 2008 Mon Mar 10 21:32:02 -0700 2008 Sun Mar 23 00:57:44 -0700 2008
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. ]]>