Call Me By Your Name (Call me by your name, 1) Paperback – 21 Sept. 2017

This book broke my heart! I feel it's important to say that before anything else, because I don't want to give you the wrong impression; that this is some kind of fluffy tale of a forbidden holiday romance. That would cheapen it, and despite the occasional sex scenes which might put off a few sensitive readers, this is a story not cheap in any way, shape or form.Call Me By Your Name is, quite simply, one of the most beautiful things I have ever read (probably the most beautiful, second only to Lolita). It is the story of a passionate, intimate and eternal - yet doomed - love between a boy named Elio and his father's house guest, Oliver, and the incredible connection that grows between them over the summer, and culminates in a tragically all-too-brief stay in Rome. The boys grow into men but their friendship, and complete and total yearning for each other, continues to draw them together even as life draws them apart...I'll confess it took me a while to get into this story; lack of dialogue tagging made it hard for me to know who was speaking, and Elio's narrative voice sometimes gets carried away on boring tangents - he's a little too high-brow to be believeable as a 17 year old. But at the same time the innocent, desperate boy's prose, imagery, and obsessive fantasies about the carefree Oliver (which he gradually comes to realise are not as pathetically one-sided as he thought!) are mesmeric, and only a few chapters in I found myself hypnotised by the sights, sounds and smells of the mediterranean, as if I'd been sucked right into Elio and Oliver's beautiful world. As I say, there is a lot of infuriating back and forth, lazy days and 'will they won't they' going on in the beginning, but don't let it put you off, because it's all an effective, agonising build up to when they finally do get together.However...like Cathy and Heathcliff of Wuthering Heights, the characters in this book suffer from major 'bang their heads together' syndrome. It's infuriating, and I often wanted to scream 'WHY? WHY DON'T YOU JUST BE TOGETHER???!!! ARGH!!' Honestly, it's incredible how much effect this book had on me. The image of Elio and Oliver's kiss in Rome will be forever burned into my imagination as though I was right there with them, and one bit of the book right near the end when Elio is wishing that he could tell Oliver something and just can't...wow, that bit made me put down the book for a moment and just burst into tears. I literally could not stop sobbing for about five minutes - I cannot remember the last time any book made me cry that hard!! (Apart from when Dobby died in Harry Potter, but that's a story for another day...)Call Me By Your Name is both a celebration and a eulogy, and even though it leaves you with a bittersweet ache inside, it also leaves you with the memories of one of the most enduring love stories ever written. Beautiful and heartrending, this is utter class and will stay with me until my dying day. I hope that, one long hot summer in the distant future, I might be brave enough to grab some tissues, curl up, and let Elio and Oliver take me back to Monet's Berm with them.

This is one of the great love stories. It evokes the longings, the sublimities, the pangs of first love with a poetic transcendence that only the finest writers can achieve. You usually have to go back to the classics, to Goethe and Turgenev, to find such delicate angst, such aching tenderness, to experience such an intense sense of intimacy and loss. There have been many coming of age stories, particularly those that feature the transformative experience of first gay love, some very good, but I cannot recall any as good as this one. It's a literary novel, scrupulous, poetic and analytic in its sensuous handling of language; it gets under the skins of its two main characters, to explore the multiplicity of meanings found in gestures, expressions, conversations, incidents, feelings. It is Proustian: the author, analysing through the eyes of a narrator looking back at his youthful self from the vantage of years and wisdom - just as Marcel did in Proust's great novel - immerses himself once more in the myriad signs of desire, love and loss.Elio, seventeen, a gifted musician, highly intelligent and literate, exceptional in many ways, meets at his parent's Italian coastal villa, Oliver, a handsome twenty-four year old, a student of his father; he is working on a book about Herodotus. Oliver has come to stay for the summer: the weather is perfect, the villa and its surroundings idyllic, the household full of civilised, liberal minded people and servants: this is the ideal setting for a summer romance, and Aciman evokes it with the skill of a subtle painter. At first, as Elio desires Oliver, trying to hide it, even from himself, but giving himself away in so many awkward ways, it is a novel of unrequited love, and everyone who has ever felt unspoken desire of this intensity knows what contortions the soul has to go through, balanced between lust and denial. At first Oliver is ambiguous in his response to the boy; he leads a life off-stage that adds to his allure, his mystery, his apparent unattainabilty, but there are signs that he's interested, signs that are highly erotic. And then the breakthrough, the souls bared, the physical intimacy, the other-worldly happiness, the sense of two ardent, exceptional beings mingling... (one has to use this language to try and indicate the profundity of this love). In the final section, which happens largely in Rome, we move from the realm of consummated love to the sharper realities of the outside world where a sense of loss, of breaking apart, gathers in a city full of pleasures and temptations. A coda gives us those poignant, fleeting, regretful moments of this love's afterlife, when the men meet a few times years later. During one of these meetings, Oliver, now a middle-aged married man with sons, declares that Elio was his 'heart of hearts'. It underlines the understated tragedy of a love lost, one which remains inexplicable, that seems like a violation of the essential rules of love. The emotion at the end is almost too much to bear, at least for this reader.Love stories seldom come as good as this. It's amazing that it's a first novel, the handling of theme and language so mature, so intelligent, so moving. As I write in 2017, ten years after it was published, a film has been released of the book. I am wondering how a film maker can turn such Proustian prose, such a delicate analysis of the heart's movements, into visuals without losing the essential texture of the story, the sense of a man looking back with such refined emotion at the defining summer of his life. I wonder if it will be able to catch the exceptional nature of this love between men, not through the introspective meditations of a literary text but through visuals, where everything has to be inferred.

Call Me By Your Name forms part of my From Page to Screen reading project. I shall be publishing my comparison of the book and the film in due course. In the meantime, you can read Andre Aciman’s own thoughts about the process of adaptation here.The book is a study of sexual exploration and of the doubts and uncertainties that characterize the early stages of a relationship. Not knowing what to say, saying the wrong thing, saying nothing… Trying to interpret another’s feelings from gestures, glances or small actions… Moving from despair to elation in response to any small sign of returned affection… Struggling with the complexity of your own feelings just as much as those of the other party. All these sensations the author describes in intricate detail as the reader wonders and agonizes along with Elio.Elio and his family seem to live a privileged and rarified existence, rather remote from the local community. Days are spent swimming, playing tennis or sunbathing. Mealtime conversations encompass history, philosophy, music, books. Although set on the Italian Riviera, I only really got a sense of the atmosphere of Italy when the action moves to Rome later in the book. That section was lively and playful and I really felt Elio’s and Oliver’s joy in each other’s company and in that vibrant city.Call Me By Your Name is beautifully written and conjures up all the emotional turmoil of young love and awakening sexuality. For me, in the end though, there was just a little too much introspection and adolescent angst. However, I’m very much looking forward to seeing the award-winning film adaptation which I think may address some of the shortcomings I found in the book.(3.5 stars)