false 98687 0374299218 9780374299217 728 213 http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1171425057m/98687.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/98687.Call_Me_by_Your_Name_A_Novel 56759 Andre Aciman 991 276 1 2009-02-28T15:23:22-08:00 445648 2009-03-14T07:41:05-07:00 256 2009-02-28T15:23:22-08:00 0 2009-02-03T15:30:56-08:00 343568 200 2009-02-03T15:30:56-08:00 5 7 false Thu Jan 01 00:00:00 -0800 2009 Fri Mar 28 21:23:16 -0700 2008 Sat Feb 28 16:09:49 -0800 2009 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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