Call me by your name by Andre Aciman

"We had the stars, you and I. And this is given once only."

The bare bones of the story could have been assembled using some kind of Gay coming of Age Trope Generator. Teenager. Grad student. Italian beach. Fruit. Poetry. Jealousy. Sex. Loss. More poetry.

The frustrations of the novel only become apparent once the spell of Aciman's spare but lovely prose has been broken. While reading it, I never thought to sneer at the clichés, or at the problems of a seventeen year old child of wealthy intellectuals. I was too entranced by the salt breezes and the sunlit stones, and the daily rituals of swimming, breakfast, dissertation work, coffee, dinner guests, town, bed, and the millions of specific new shades of pain that result from each and every moment spent around, and away from, the narrator's object of desire. There are some story frustrations here, to be sure, but from this book, it was almost uncomfortable to read it in public.

"This novel is hot", wrote NYT reviewer Stacey D'Erasmo. Hell,yes. The heat here is not the heat of sex acts, however,(though there is that) but the heat of an ever-building, single-minded, raw-gutted longing, and the pain of remembering it. The heat is the agony of obsession, when any solitary-glance or casual exchange can be sharpened with two, three, ten edges of conflicting meaning.

I don't know that I've ever read a book so relentlessly accurate in its dealing of each precise doubt and hope, but mostly doubt, that colors any interaction or lack of interaction with the object of one's desire. These precise doubts are separated out and distilled purely and tightly and lucidly by Aciman. He just does not let up. This was the great surprise of CALL ME BY YOUR NAME, for me. As much as I thought I'd want to throw this book down at times, I almost missed my stop because it would not let me go. 

Some details: 

About the author:

André Aciman was born in Alexandria, Egypt and is an American memoirist, essayist, novelist, and scholar of seventeenth-century literature. He has also written many essays and reviews on Marcel Proust. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, The Paris Review, The New Republic, Condé Nast Traveler as well as in many volumes of The Best American Essays. Aciman received his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Harvard University, has taught at Princeton and Bard and is Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature at The CUNY Graduate Center. He is currently chair of the Ph. D. Program in Comparative Literature and founder and director of The Writers' Institute at the Graduate Center. 

Aciman is the author of the Whiting Award-winning memoir Out of Egypt (1995), an account of his childhood as a Jew growing up in post-colonial Egypt. Aciman has published two other books: False Papers: Essays in Exile and Memory (2001), and a novel Call Me By Your Name (2007), which was chosen as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and won the Lambda Literary Award for Men's Fiction (2008). His forthcoming novel Eight White Nights (FSG) will be published on February 14, 2010

Genre:

Fiction, Romance, contemporary, LGBT. 

Yours,

The Romance Reader💋