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Call Me by Your Name: A Novel Kindle Edition
Now a Major Motion Picture from Director Luca Guadagnino, Starring Armie Hammer and Timothée Chalamet, and Written by Three-Time Oscar™ Nominee James Ivory
The Basis of the Oscar-Winning Best Adapted Screenplay
A New York Times Bestseller
A USA Today Bestseller
A Los Angeles Times Bestseller
A Vulture Book Club Pick
An Instant Classic and One of the Great Love Stories of Our Time
Andre Aciman's Call Me by Your Name is the story of a sudden and powerful romance that blossoms between an adolescent boy and a summer guest at his parents’ cliffside mansion on the Italian Riviera. Each is unprepared for the consequences of their attraction, when, during the restless summer weeks, unrelenting currents of obsession, fascination, and desire intensify their passion and test the charged ground between them. Recklessly, the two verge toward the one thing both fear they may never truly find again: total intimacy. It is an instant classic and one of the great love stories of our time.
Winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Ficition
A New York Times Notable Book of the Year • A Publishers Weekly and The Washington Post Best Book of the Year • A New York Magazine "Future Canon" Selection • A Chicago Tribune and Seattle Times (Michael Upchurch's) Favorite Favorite Book of the Year
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherFarrar, Straus and Giroux
- Publication dateJanuary 22, 2008
- File size2106 KB
- Perhaps we were friends first and lovers second. But then perhaps this is what lovers are.Highlighted by 8,452 Kindle readers
- Time makes us sentimental. Perhaps, in the end, it is because of time that we suffer.Highlighted by 7,840 Kindle readers
- P.S. We are not written for one instrument alone; I am not, neither are you.Highlighted by 6,877 Kindle readers
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Review
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
If Not Later, When?
"Later!" The word, the voice, the attitude.
I'd never heard anyone use "later" to say goodbye before. It sounded harsh, curt, and dismissive, spoken with the veiled indifference of people who may not care to see or hear from you again.
It is the first thing I remember about him, and I can hear it still today. Later!
I shut my eyes, say the word, and I'm back in Italy, so many years ago, walking down the tree-lined driveway, watching him step out of the cab, billowy blue shirt, wide-open collar, sunglasses, straw hat, skin everywhere. Suddenly he's shaking my hand, handing me his backpack, removing his suitcase from the trunk of the cab, asking if my father is home.
It might have started right there and then: the shirt, the rolled-up sleeves, the rounded balls of his heels slipping in and out of his frayed espadrilles, eager to test the hot gravel path that led to our house, every stride already asking, Which way to the beach?
This summer's houseguest. Another bore.
Then, almost without thinking, and with his back already turned to the car, he waves the back of his free hand and utters a careless Later! to another passenger in the car who has probably split the fare from the station. No name added, no jest to smooth out the ruffled leave-taking, nothing. His one-word send-off: brisk, bold, and blunted--take your pick, he couldn't be bothered which.
You watch, I thought, this is how he'll say goodbye to us when the time comes. With a gruff, slapdash Later!
Meanwhile, we'd have to put up with him for six long weeks.
I was thoroughly intimidated. The unapproachable sort.
I could grow to like him, though. From rounded chin to rounded heel. Then, within days, I would learn to hate him.
This, the very person whose photo on the application form months earlier had leapt out with promises of instant affinities.
Taking in summer guests was my parents' way of helping young academics revise a manuscript before publication. For six weeks each summer I'd have to vacate my bedroom and move one room down the corridor into a much smaller room that had once belonged to my grandfather. During the winter months, when we were away in the city, it became a part-time toolshed, storage room, and attic where rumor had it my grandfather, my namesake, still ground his teeth in his eternal sleep. Summer residents didn't have to pay anything, were given the full run of the house, and could basically do anything they pleased, provided they spent an hour or so a day helping my father with his correspondence and assorted paperwork. They became part of the family, and after about fifteen years of doing this, we had gotten used to a shower of postcards and gift packages not only around Christmastime but all year long from people who were now totally devoted to our family and would go out of their way when they were in Europe to drop by B. for a day or two with their family and take a nostalgic tour of their old digs.
At meals there were frequently two or three other guests, sometimes neighbors or relatives, sometimes colleagues, lawyers, doctors, the rich and famous who'd drop by to see my father on their way to their own summer houses. Sometimes we'd even open our dining room to the occasional tourist couple who'd heard of the old villa and simply wanted to come by and take a peek and were totally enchanted when asked to eat with us and tell us all about themselves, while Mafalda, informed at the last minute, dished out her usual fare. My father, who was reserved and shy in private, loved nothing better than to have some precocious rising expert in a field keep the conversation going in a few languages while the hot summer sun, after a few glasses of rosatello, ushered in the unavoidable afternoon torpor. We named the task dinner drudgery--and, after a while, so did most of our six-week guests.
Maybe it started soon after his arrival during one of those grinding lunches when he sat next to me and it finally dawned on me that, despite a light tan acquired during his brief stay in Sicily earlier that summer, the color on the palms of his hands was the same as the pale, soft skin of his soles, of his throat, of the bottom of his forearms, which hadn't really been exposed to much sun. Almost a light pink, as glistening and smooth as the underside of a lizard's belly. Private, chaste, unfledged, like a blush on an athlete's face or an instance of dawn on a stormy night. It told me things about him I never knew to ask.
It may have started during those endless hours after lunch when everybody lounged about in bathing suits inside and outside the house, bodies sprawled everywhere, killing time before someone finally suggested we head down to the rocks for a swim. Relatives, cousins, neighbors, friends, friends of friends, colleagues, or just about anyone who cared to knock at our gate and ask if they could use our tennis court--everyone was welcome to lounge and swim and eat and, if they stayed long enough, use the guesthouse.
Or perhaps it started on the beach. Or at the tennis court. Or during our first walk together on his very first day when I was asked to show him the house and its surrounding area and, one thing leading to the other, managed to take him past the very old forged-iron metal gate as far back as the endless empty lot in the hinterland toward the abandoned train tracks that used to connect B. to N. "Is there an abandoned station house somewhere?" he asked, looking through the trees under the scalding sun, probably trying to ask the right question of the owner's son. "No, there was never a station house. The train simply stopped when you asked." He was curious about the train; the rails seemed so narrow. It was a two-wagon train bearing the royal insignia, I explained. Gypsies lived in it now. They'd been living there ever since my mother used to summer here as a girl. The gypsies had hauled the two derailed cars farther inland. Did he want to see them? "Later. Maybe." Polite indifference, as if he'd spotted my misplaced zeal to play up to him and was summarily pushing me away.
But it stung me.
Instead, he said he wanted to open an account in one of the banks in B., then pay a visit to his Italian translator, whom his Italian publisher had engaged for his book.
I decided to take him there by bike.
The conversation was no better on wheels than on foot. Along the way, we stopped for something to drink. The bar-tabaccheria was totally dark and empty. The owner was mopping the floor with a powerful ammonia solution. We stepped outside as soon as we could. A lonely blackbird, sitting in a Mediterranean pine, sang a few notes that were immediately drowned out by the rattle of the cicadas.
I took a long swill from a large bottle of mineral water, passed it to him, then drank from it again. I spilled some on my hand and rubbed my face with it, running my wet fingers through my hair. The water was insufficiently cold, not fizzy enough, leaving behind an unslaked likeness of thirst.
What did one do around here?
Nothing. Wait for summer to end.
What did one do in the winter, then?
I smiled at the answer I was about to give. He got the gist and said, "Don't tell me: wait for summer to come, right?"
I liked having my mind read. He'd pick up on dinner drudgery sooner than those before him.
"Actually, in the winter the place gets very gray and dark. We come for Christmas. Otherwise it's a ghost town."
"And what else do you do here at Christmas besides roast chestnuts and drink eggnog?"
He was teasing. I offered the same smile as before. He understood, said nothing, we laughed.
He asked what I did. I played tennis. Swam. Went out at night. Jogged. Transcribed music. Read.
He said he jogged too. Early in the morning. Where did one jog around here? Along the promenade, mostly. I could show him if he wanted.
It hit me in the face just when I was starting to like him again: "Later, maybe."
I had put reading last on my list, thinking that, with the willful, brazen attitude he'd displayed so far, reading would figure last on his. A few hours later, when I remembered that he had just finished writing a book on Heraclitus and that "reading" was probably not an insignificant part of his life, I realized that I needed to perform some clever backpedaling and let him know that my real interests lay right alongside his. What unsettled me, though, was not the fancy footwork needed to redeem myself. It was the unwelcome misgivings with which it finally dawned on me, both then and during our casual conversation by the train tracks, that I had all along, without seeming to, without even admitting it, already been trying--and failing--to win him over.
When I did offer--because all visitors loved the idea--to take him to San Giacomo and walk up to the very top of the belfry we nicknamed To-die-for, I should have known better than to just stand there without a comeback. I thought I'd bring him around simply by taking him up there and letting him take in the view of the town, the sea, eternity. But no. Later!
But it might have started way later than I think without my noticing anything at all. You see someone, but you don't really see him, he's in the wings. Or you notice him, but nothing clicks, nothing "catches," and before you're even aware of a presence, or of something troubling you, the six weeks that were offered you have almost passed and he's either already gone or just about to leave, and you're basically scrambling to come to terms with something, which, unbeknownst to you, has been brewing for weeks under your very nose and bears all the symptoms of what you're forced to call I want. How couldn't I have known, you ask? I know desire when I see it--and yet, this time, it slipped by completely. I was going for the devious smile that would suddenly light up his face each time he'd read my mind, when all I really wanted was skin, just skin.
At dinner on his third evening, I sensed that he was staring at me as I was explaining Haydn's Seven Last Words of Christ, which I'd been transcribing. I was seventeen that year and, being the youngest at the table and the least likely to be listened to, I had developed the habit of smuggling as much information into the fewest possible words. I spoke fast, which gave people the impression that I was always flustered and muffling my words. After I had finished explaining my transcription, I became aware of the keenest glance coming from my left. It thrilled and flattered me; he was obviously interested--he liked me. It hadn't been as difficult as all that, then. But when, after taking my time, I finally turned to face him and take in his glance, I met a cold and icy glare--something at once hostile and vitrified that bordered on cruelty.
It undid me completely. What had I done to deserve this? I wanted him to be kind to me again, to laugh with me as he had done just a few days earlier on the abandoned train tracks, or when I'd explained to him that same afternoon that B. was the only town in Italy where the corriera, the regional bus line, carrying Christ, whisked by without ever stopping. He had immediately laughed and recognized the veiled allusion to Carlo Levi's book. I liked how our minds seemed to travel in parallel, how we instantly inferred what words the other was toying with but at the last moment held back.
He was going to be a difficult neighbor. Better stay away from him, I thought. To think that I had almost fallen for the skin of his hands, his chest, his feet that had never touched a rough surface in their existence--and his eyes, which, when their other, kinder gaze fell on you, came like the miracle of the Resurrection. You could never stare long enough but needed to keep staring to find out why you couldn't.
I must have shot him a similarly wicked glance.
For two days our conversations came to a sudden halt.
On the long balcony that both our bedrooms shared, total avoidance: just a makeshift hello, good morning, nice weather, shallow chitchat.
Then, without explanation, things resumed.
Did I want to go jogging this morning? No, not really. Well, let's swim, then.
Today, the pain, the stoking, the thrill of someone new, the promise of so much bliss hovering a fingertip away, the fumbling around people I might misread and don't want to lose and must second-guess at every turn, the desperate cunning I bring to everyone I want and crave to be wanted by, the screens I put up as though between me and the world there were not just one but layers of rice-paper sliding doors, the urge to scramble and unscramble what was never really coded in the first place--all these started the summer Oliver came into our house. They are embossed on every song that was a hit that summer, in every novel I read during and after his stay, on anything from the smell of rosemary on hot days to the frantic rattle of the cicadas in the afternoon--smells and sounds I'd grown up with and known every year of my life until then but that had suddenly turned on me and acquired an inflection forever colored by the events of that summer.
Or perhaps it started after his first week, when I was thrilled to see he still remembered who I was, that he didn't ignore me, and that, therefore, I could allow myself the luxury of passing him on my way to the garden and not having to pretend I was unaware of him. We jogged early on the first morning--all the way up to B. and back. Early the next morning we swam. Then, the day after, we jogged again. I liked racing by the milk delivery van when it was far from done with its rounds, or by the grocer and the baker as they were just getting ready for business, liked to run along the shore and the promenade when there wasn't a soul about yet and our house seemed a distant mirage. I liked it when our feet were aligned, left with left, and struck the ground at the same time, leaving footprints on the shore that I wished to return to and, in secret, place my foot where his had left its mark.
This alternation of running and swimming was simply his "routine" in graduate school. Did he run on the Sabbath? I joked. He always exercised, even when he was sick; he'd exercise in bed if he had to. Even when he'd slept with someone new the night before, he said, he'd still head out for a jog early in the morning. The only time he didn't exercise was when they operated on him. When I asked him what for, the answer I had promised never to incite in him came at me like the thwack of a jack-in-the-box wearing a baleful smirk. "Later."
Perhaps he was out of breath and didn't want to talk too much or just wanted to concentrate on his swimming or his running. Or perhaps it was his way of spurring me to do the same--totally harmless.
But there was something at once chilling and off-putting in the sudden distance that crept between us in the most unexpected moments. It was almost as though he were doing it on purpose; feeding me slack, and more slack, and then yanking away any semblance of fellowship.
The steely gaze always returned. One day, while I was practicing my guitar at what had become "my table" in the back garden by the pool and he was lying nearby on the grass, I recognized the gaze right away. He had been staring at me while I was focusing on the fingerboard, and when I suddenly raised my face to see if he liked what I was playing, there it was: cutting, cruel, like a glistening blade instantly retracted the moment its victim caught sight of it. He gave me a bland smile, as though to say, No point hiding it now.
Stay away from him.
He must have noticed I was shaken and in an effort to make it up to me began asking me questions about the guitar. I was too much on my guard to answer him with candor. Meanwhile, hearing me scramble for answers made him suspect that perhaps more was amiss than I was showing. "Don't bother explaining. Just play it again." But I thought you hated it. Hated it? Whatever gave you that idea? We argued back and forth. "Just play it, will you?" "The same one?" "The same one."
I stood up and walked into the living room, leaving the large French windows open so that he might hear me play it on the piano. He followed me halfway and, leaning on the windows' wooden frame, listened for a while.
"You changed it. It's not the same. What did you do to it?"
"I just played it the way Liszt would have played it had he jimmied around with it."
"Just play it again, please!"
I liked the way he feigned exasperation. So I started playing the piece again.
After a while: "I can't believe you changed it again."
"Well, not by much. This is just how Busoni would have played it if he had altered Liszt's version."
"Can't you just play the Bach the way Bach wrote it?"
"But Bach never wrote it for guitar. He may not even have written it for the harpsichord. In fact, we're not even sure it's by Bach at all."
"Forget I asked."
"Okay, okay. No need to get so worked up," I said. It was my turn to feign grudging acquiescence. "This is the Bach as transcribed by me without Busoni and Liszt. It's a very young Bach and it's dedicated to his brother."
I knew exactly what phrase in the piece must have stirred him the first time, and each time I played it, I was sending it to him as a little gift, because it was really dedicated to him, as a token of something very beautiful in me that would take no genius to figure out and that urged me to throw in an extended cadenza. Just for him.
We were--and he must have recognized the signs long before I did--flirting.
Excerpted from Call Me By Your Name by André Aciman. Copyright © 2007 by André Aciman. Published in January 2007 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. All rights reserved.
Product details
- ASIN : B004L62E08
- Publisher : Farrar, Straus and Giroux (January 22, 2008)
- Publication date : January 22, 2008
- Language : English
- File size : 2106 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Sticky notes : On Kindle Scribe
- Print length : 242 pages
- Best Sellers Rank: #28,681 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
André Aciman is an American memoirist, essayist, and New York Times bestselling novelist originally from Alexandria, Egypt. 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 New Republic, Condé Nast Traveler, The Paris Review, Granta as well as in many volumes of The Best American Essays.
Aciman grew up in a multilingual and multinational family and attended English-language schools, first in Alexandria and later, after his family moved to Italy in 1965, in Rome. In 1968, Aciman's family moved again, this time to New York City, where he graduated in 1973 from Lehman College. Aciman received his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Harvard University and, after teaching at Princeton University and Bard College, is Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature at The Graduate Center of The City University of New York. He is currently chair of the Ph. D. Program in Comparative Literature and founder and director of The Writers' Institute at the Graduate Center. He has also taught creative writing at New York University, Cooper Union, and and Yeshiva University. In 2009, Aciman was also Visiting Distinguished Writer at Wesleyan University.
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. His books and essays have been translated in many languages. In addition to Out of Egypt (1995), Aciman has published False Papers: Essays in Exile and Memory (2001) and Alibis: Essays on Elswhere (2011), and four novels, Enigma Variations (2017), Harvard Square (2013), Eight White Nights (2010) and Call Me By Your Name (2007), for which he won the Lambda Literary Award for Men's Fiction (2008). He also edited Letters of Transit (1999) and The Proust Project (2004) and prefaced Monsieur Proust (2003), The Light of New York (2007), Condé Nast Traveler's Room With a View (2010) and Stefan Zweig's Journey to the Past (2010). His novel Call Me by Your Name has been turned into a film (2017), directed by Luca Guadagnino, with a screenplay by James Ivory, and starring Armie Hammer and Timothée Chalamet.
He is currently working on his fifth novel and a collection of essays.
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Let me preface my praises of this book by saying that I had a difficult, love-hate relationship with Elio (protagonist and narrator). His obsessive reading, re-reading, over-reading, over-re-reading into every little look, word, silence, and lack of look, borders on the hysterical if not out-right insane and nearly drives this book's readers (or me, at least) insane right along with him. Not to mention that it nearly breaks the taut string suspending the reader's disbelief because honestly, what teenage even speaks let alone THINKS like this? But after reaching the second act, it's quite clear that this obsessiveness is what has isolated him from his peers and why he searches to be so completely understood by someone like Oliver, who speaks his same coded language of gestures and unspoken words - even though they're often not on the same wave length.
Elio's fevered imaginings also make him an almost delightfully unreliable narrator, where something he narrates early on as fact (e.g. the cold, death-glares he'd receive from Oliver) turn out to be misguided by his prejudices and not true at all. It lends a tender, nostalgic quality to the whole thing (which is already close to bursting with nostalgia), knowing that all the events are not as they were but merely as he remembers them.
I came to realize that the story was painful to read because it was a painfully exact replica of what it is to be a teenager, and not because it was poorly written or ill-conceived. It intentionally takes its readers back to a time when your insides were on your outsides, all your feelings exposed, leaving you raw and vulnerable, so that every glance, every snide remark, especially from the person you're infatuated with, is like hot knives on your bare flesh. The reason I was so infuriated with Elio was because I was infuriated with myself, when I was a teenager, and felt and behaved the exact same way. Elio, despite his staggering intellect for a seventeen-year-old, is a profound idiot just like I was a profound idiot.
The meat of the story is the romance between our leads, slow and painful in its engineering (like a roller-coaster going up), terrifying, rocketing, elating, wonderful when it's happening (the roller-coaster plummeting), that leaves you aching, dizzy, and nauseous in its denouement (the end of the ride). You spend so much time worshiping Oliver through Elio's eyes that when he turns out to be the coward, you refuse to believe it, until you're dragged unwillingly to the book's end are slapped in the face with the reality that yes, Oliver was the coward all along.
This is probably one of the most erotic reads of the 21st century, thanks in no small part to the breathless suspense leading up to their first encounter together, but also because the author understands how sensuality is enhanced by disgust. Even though the book sometimes crosses the thin line between sexy gross and full blown gross-out (by the end of the book ALL of the bodily fluids have been prominently featured), it leaves the burning, frenzied sensuality at its core stronger for it.
I am confident that the movie adaptation (which I'll be watching soon) will be a perfect companion to this book, as it likely won't suffer from the book's flaws, such as being overly verbose, and its slow pacing on screen will probably feel more like sexual tension than having your nails being summarily torn from your fingers. Nonetheless, the novel contains some of the most stellar, quotable lines you'll ever encounter, and such gut-wrenching realism surrounding its heartbreak that you'll feel it as a hot knife across your raw skin.
If I could say one thing to this novel it would be: I'll die if you stop.
Call Me by Your Name was enchanting and enthralling in every possible way. Written in a stream of conscious style, 17 year old Elio pulls the reader into his world and brings them along for every thought, every moment, every impulse that passes through his mind. It's an intimate, sometimes awkward ride, but you can't help but connect with Elio's exasperated attempts to make sense of himself and his emotions as he navigates a tricky relationship.
There are hundreds of things that make this story worth consuming, but I'll start with what has stuck with me the most: the atmosphere. Elio's family owns an Italian villa in the small town of B and the European, lazy summertime environment leaks from every page. From incessant cigarette consumption to hours spent reading by the pool and taking trips to swim and traveling to bookshops in town, Elio's romantic endeavors are paralleled perfectly by his romantic environment. I'll be honest, I'm writing this review after also having seen the movie and then immediately preceding to read the book for a second time, so perhaps the images from the book and film are intertwining in my mind, though flipping back through the pages, I find lines on every page that just ooze sexual tension and summer heat.
Elio's thoughts are confused and honest, fully encompassing the battle between his emotional and intellectual hemispheres. He's impulsive but reflective, somewhat timid in nature but tends to be forward in his speech. Dialogue is woven into thought, Elio's fantasies feel as real as his physical connections and every emotion he describes feels open and true. No complications in Oliver and Elio's relationship are glossed over and every moment of doubt and discomfort is identified and analyzed. I guess if there's one thing about this narrative that feels unique in comparison to most romantic books I've read, it's the unwavering honesty on every page.
I will admit, this read is intense and at times uncomfortable (I can think of one or two now infamous scenes in particular) but there are moments in this book that took my breath away. The novel's third part was by far my favorite as it shows Oliver and Elio at their brightest, clad in love and acceptance among Rome's beautiful backdrop and it's definitely a section I appreciated more the second time through knowing the pains of the final act to follow.
Overall, there is so much I could say about this book; the story hasn't left my mind at all these last few weeks. I'm encouraging everyone I know to dive headfirst into this beautiful story whatever order they wish to consume it. (I recommend 1. soundtrack, 2. book, 3. film). This is a book I'm sure I'll be picking up again this Summer, though unfortunately, not in Italy :(
(4.75/5 stars)
Top reviews from other countries
Sin duda abogas por su romance. Como
Siempre, los libros superan a las películas
In the 80s, based on the Italian Riviera, 17 year old Elio falls deeply and irrevocably in love with Oliver, an older scholar who had come to get assistance from Elio's father for his manuscript that was to be published soon. During his stay for over six weeks with Elio's family, he evokes this swooning passion in the young boy with his charming conversation skills and very American manners. It is with great care that Aciman has directed the narrative through Elio, his burning desire for Oliver which sometimes resembled that of borderline obsession of a young boy. These profound feelings of desire on Elio's part were romantically magnified with the slightest of touch and the most mundane of events by the author. Through the characters of Elio's parents, Aciman makes way for the lovers to experience the deep aches of love and heartache in young love without any societal impediment. Aciman's words are kindred to those of a beautiful gust of wind and his characters are free in their choices of love and living. The memories of adoration and Italy amalgamated and took me into a trance that I didn't want to step out of. This is truly what a novel about romance should feel like, with its unexplainable heartbeats in the gut and feverish longing all wrapped up with incessant passion.
Reviewed in India on September 9, 2022
In the 80s, based on the Italian Riviera, 17 year old Elio falls deeply and irrevocably in love with Oliver, an older scholar who had come to get assistance from Elio's father for his manuscript that was to be published soon. During his stay for over six weeks with Elio's family, he evokes this swooning passion in the young boy with his charming conversation skills and very American manners. It is with great care that Aciman has directed the narrative through Elio, his burning desire for Oliver which sometimes resembled that of borderline obsession of a young boy. These profound feelings of desire on Elio's part were romantically magnified with the slightest of touch and the most mundane of events by the author. Through the characters of Elio's parents, Aciman makes way for the lovers to experience the deep aches of love and heartache in young love without any societal impediment. Aciman's words are kindred to those of a beautiful gust of wind and his characters are free in their choices of love and living. The memories of adoration and Italy amalgamated and took me into a trance that I didn't want to step out of. This is truly what a novel about romance should feel like, with its unexplainable heartbeats in the gut and feverish longing all wrapped up with incessant passion.
A primeira coisa que me fez perceber que este livro não é para todo mundo foi sua honestidade. Talvez honestidade seja uma palavra simples demais para o jeito que a história foi narrada sem medo, sem pudor, sem qualquer inibição. Do mesmo modo em que os dois personagens se entregam completamente um ao outro, a escrita é feita de intimidade e vulnerabilidade completas, de filosofia e poesia, e de detalhes reais e fantasiosos, idealizados, eróticos, românticos, dolorosos e vergonhosos. Ela abraça todas as emoções do Elio, das mais intensas e obsessivas às mais simples e impulsivas, sem medo de entregar demais. Foi extremamente corajoso do autor escrever esse livro como seu primeiro.
E foi uma honra ler esse livro, fazer parte dessa intimidade que não era minha. Fiquei impressionada quando percebi a quantidade de emoções diferentes que eu tinha já sentido e reconheci no Elio, e mais ainda quando vi quantas sentia em poucas frases. Fiquei ansiosa, plena e feliz, ri às vezes, para frases abaixo perceber toda a tristeza da situação e logo em seguida ser consolada pela beleza desse amor existir. Foram tantas emoções mesmo, que terminei chorando meus olhos fora (choro super fácil com livros, mas esse consegue tirar lágrimas até de quem não chora), daquele tipo de choro que é mais emotivo do que racional. É até um pouco assustador ver meu próprio luto pelo final da história, ainda que ele me dê certo consolo. Não foi só nessa hora que chorei como se tivesse perdido algo valioso que nunca encontraria de novo. Minha parte favorita é a conversa do Elio com seu pai perto do final, e, ainda que o livro já não tivesse me dado nada para pensar ou para sentir antes, ele teria valido completamente a pena só por ela.
É difícil dizer se recomendo o livro. Recomendo, é claro, mas tenho medo de fazê-lo cair em mãos de quem não o entenderá ou merecerá. O texto parece difícil de longe, com frases e parágrafos longos, mas que eu lia como se pensasse junto com Elio, quase freneticamente. As falas também são misturadas às vezes em narração, de vez em quando sem qualquer indicação, o que eu achei ótimo, na verdade, não cheguei a ficar confundida sobre quem falava. Nunca poderia imaginar que isso me agradaria, principalmente porque não é do tipo de coisa que agrada a maioria das pessoas. Como eu falei, um livro que fica com você, que te faz repensar muita coisa, invejar dor e se entregar à história. Não é para todo mundo.