false 4 2 false false Wed Nov 12 00:00:00 -0800 2008 Thu Sep 18 01:16:04 -0700 2008 Thu Nov 13 16:33:38 -0800 2008
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.]]>