William2's Reviews > Call Me by Your Name

This book is a fucking axe to the heart. But because my heart, perhaps yours, too, was broken long ago, no further damage can be done. So perhaps the book's more like a probe, yes, a very discomfiting probe, making a fuller assessment of the wreckage. The book is also a final report of the survey. Finally, one thinks, here’s someone who has not only plumbed the depths of heartbreak, but who’s taken excruciatingly detailed notes along the way revealing every nuance of the required self-abasement. The result is an astonishing catharsis for the reader.

This is what literature at its best can do. Think Aeschylus’s Oresteia, but with an all-mortal cast and without the choruses. I speak here of the novel’s sheer emotional power.

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. The technique reminds me of Philip Roth’s American Pastoral, in which circumstances are similarly considered then reconsidered. 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 coda. 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, let me say that this book is likely to resound more with those with some mileage on them (real or metaphorical). 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.

“In love’s service only the wounded soldiers can serve.” —Thornton Wilder

The end was simply excruciating yet I couldn't stop reading. Extremely powerful. I will reread this one soon. In terms of achievement, I place Call Me By Your Name on the same shelf as Madame Bovary and Lolita and, yes, very near Aeschylus too.