Call Me By Your Name
“We rip out so much of ourselves to be cured of things faster than we should that we go bankrupt by the age of thirty and have less to offer each time we start with someone new. But to feel nothing so as not to feel anything - what a waste!”
For most of the novel the narrative is the first-person thoughts, fantasies, worries, shames and fears of Elio in the summer of his 17th year. The young man is with his parents at their big comfortable summer house on the Italian Riviera. It’s the mid-1980s. The boy’s father is an academic and Oliver, 24, is a young American colleague exchanging some brief work as amanuensis for room and board while finishing his own manuscript. But in the marvelous, big-hearted Italian sense, Oliver, even if for only the six weeks of his stay, is very much a part of the family.
Women are alluring to Elio but they are not his predominant fascination this particular summer. Description is thin at first, almost transient, and because the reader’s not distracted by descriptive flights he or she never feels far from the anguish of Elio. Life’s first love is the theme, and this iteration is so fresh, so vivid and beautifully layered, that it’s not to be missed. Among the best parts of the novel are those passages in which Elio—before his intimacy with Oliver begins—imagines what he might say to Oliver, the multiple responses he might at any moment utter in Oliver’s presence, or imagined presence. Elio’s mind is racing with alternative scenarios. Is this even what he wants? He’s not sure but he wants to find out. Matters are thought out and after some new bit of action or information, rethought and modified. There is a mastery of tone here that constantly astonishes and bewilders.
Later in the novel, when the description intensifies, it’s as if it has been saved for just these moments of lovemaking, the confidential exchanges between the two in their subsequent walks and swims, their farewell in Rome, the devastating breakup. It is the frankness between the two young men that to my mind constitutes the book’s magic. That something as amorphous as desire can be written about with such fluidity and integrity is near miraculous. The wrenching depiction of Elio’s new and utterly discomfiting passion consumes not only him but us as well.
In closing, this book is likely to resound more with those with some mileage on them. The prerequisite is suffering. One can’t imagine the novel’s insights and wisdom working their wonders on anyone who hasn’t at some time put everything on the line. The end was simply excruciating yet I couldn't stop reading. Extremely powerful. I will reread this one soon.
