Katie's Reviews > Call Me by Your Name

I wanted to make fun of this maddening book, but really, I must just want to make fun of myself for loving it. The bare bones of the story could have been assembled using some kind of Gay Coming of Age Novel Trope Generator. Teenager. Grad student. Italian beach. Fruit. Poetry. Jealousy. Sex. Loss. More poetry.

But. I agree with whoever likens Aciman's approach to Proust's (which is probably everybody who has read both Aciman and Proust.) This is not a Gay Coming of Age Novel, at all; it's an elegy for desire, for memory itself; and it manages to visit that interior terrain of longing most notably visited by A LA RECHERCHE DU TEMPS PERDU, without begging a side-by-side comparison. (Which is a feat in itself. What novelist could really survive a direct comparison to Proust? Best to avoid it.)

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, I was only expecting a bit of light escapism for my subway ride. My expectations were so successfully shattered, 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 detailing 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.