About this title: This heartrending elegy to human passion is the story of a sudden and powerful romance that blossoms between an adolescent boy and a summer guest at his parents' house, a cliffside mansion on the Italian Riviera.
Note: This is a general synopsis. Each listing is described below.
Description: Good. Former Library book. Shows some signs of wear, and may have some markings on the inside. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! read more
Description: Acceptable. Former Library book. Shows definite wear, and perhaps considerable marking on inside. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Date Published: 2007
ISBN-13:9780739480427ISBN:0739480421
Description: Good. A copy that has been read, but remains in clean condition. All pages are intact, and the cover is intact (including dustcover, if applicable). The spine may show signs of wear. Pages can include limited notes and highlighting, and the copy can include "from the library of" labels. read more
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Picador
Date Published: 2008-01-22
ISBN-13:9780312426781ISBN:031242678X
Description: Like New. May be shiny, in some instances dust jackets are not included, no missing pages, no damage to binding, may have a remainder mark. read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Date Published: 2007
ISBN-13:9780374299217ISBN:0374299218
Description: Fine in ln jacket. Hardcover with dust jacket, Like New, clean, tight, unmarked, some light cover edge wear All orders are shipped by kbooks every business day. read more
"What an incredible novel! Aciman is, perhaps not surprisingly, a leading Proust scholar, and the book is very much in search of lost time or, to use another translation of Proust's, a remembrance of things past. I include both translations because each says something different, and I think both apply to Aciman's novel, which gives to its readers the most eloquent, most evocative, most literate narrator I've met in quite some time.
On the surface, the story is simple: a summer love between an American graduate student and a young Italian man, doomed to fail as all summer loves are. Yet the novel itself is more about the memory of the love affair, and even more pointedly about the remembering of it, than it is about the love affair itself.
As may be expected of a Proustian scholar, Aciman writes a novel that studies the mind more than the events. CALL ME BY YOUR NAME is quite possibly the most introspective, most studying, most percolating novel I've yet read, and what luck that it's about an obsessive love affair! (I hate the word 'obsessive,' due to its negative 'stalkerish' connotations, but I cannot think of another word that describes the sort of all-encompassing, worshiping, consuming type of love between Oliver and Elio.) Perhaps my true passion for this novel lies in the fact that I, too, spend quite a lot of time thinking about my past loves, and as I read Elio's words, his reactions, his thoughts, I matched them point-for-point to my own words and reactions and thoughts. Aciman has managed to put into words the feelings we experience as we love, which, as anybody who has ever loved before understands, is not an easy task.
I feel as if I haven't said enough about Aciman's style, which is eloquent, graceful, literate, beautiful. This is truly literature, not fiction. High diction, complex syntax, extensive (though not excessive) figurative language. What is truly amazing is that this style, when analyzed outside of the moment of reading, seems overbearing, overdone, overwrought -- just over -- and yet as you read, everything is perfect, nothing should or even could be done in a different way. And that is the mark of a truly great novelist.
I'm rather depressed to find that this is, to date, the only novel of Aciman's, and I wait, rather impatiently, for his next."
"i was entirely captured by the first two sections of this book. unlike my good friend jeff, i found myself totally taken by pretty boys writing books and talking music and philosophy in a villa on the italian riviera in the middle of the mediterranean summer. maybe it's because i know the mediterranean summer, though i have never spent it on the riviera or, for that matter, in a villa. there's some scott fitzgerald that takes place in a similar environs, and i dare same some hemingway. i thought i had had enough of decadent descriptions of life on the riviera in the summer, but nope, i hadn't and haven't.
this is all foil. the real story is the depiction of unbearable adolescent longing and lust, mixed with guilt, self-hatred, impossibility, and an overwhelming sense of doom. i found the subtle description of the tiny nuances of these complex feelings riveting, pitch-perfect, and heartbreaking (because, let's face it, none of us ever entirely outgrows his or her adolescence, the same as we never outgrow our childhood: rather, we pile all these former selves inside us, perching the adult precariously on top).
i lost interest, instead, when the novel moved into the third part. but this is probably me. after all that skin and sun, nighttime rome felt contrived to me. it is also more difficult to describe perfect happiness than perfect misery, and less interesting to read about it.
i would like to mention the fact that, to the best of my judgement, this egyptian author makes his protagonist italian (yes?), and that both lovers are jewish, one sephardic the other one presumably ashkenazi (aciman is himself a sephardic jew). quite a bit is made of the jewishness at the beginning; later, though, it gets dropped out of the novel. since the beginning is the part in which longing and loss are most prominent, this seems significant to me. elio's isolation (he doesn't have any friends, he spends all day alone with is music, his parents are worried about him, he is not much interested in girls) is a mixture of gayness, overcultivation (at some point oliver asks him, "do you know everything?" and, truly, he does!), and jewishness.
equally intriguing, in the same melancholy and doomed way, is the little girl vimimi (what kind of name is that???), who lives with her leukemia and her certain death like a top-notch stoic.
*** SPOILER ***
i'm angry at this book for the violence it consciously does to one's heart strings, and i'm particularly angry at the very last part, in which the description of failed lives made out of missed chances reaches a truly tragic pitch. but the first part, with all the sun and the lust, with the uncertainty and the despair and the intolerable longing, with the blind heartache that hits kids who haven't yet gotten used to life, that spoke to me."
"Right now you may not want to feel anything. Perhaps you never wished to feel anything. And perhaps it's not with me that you'll want to speak about these things. But feel something you did" (p. 224).
Hmm, I'm not sure what to make of this now. Poignant? Corny? Implausible? All of the above?"
"I cannot reccommend this book enough! full of raw emotion and more than once hit the spot where i felt like ive gone through many of the emotion described in this book! Aciman's first novel poignantly probes a boy's erotic coming-of-age at his family's Italian Mediterranean home. Elio-17, extremely well-read, sensitive and the son of a prominent expatriate professor-finds himself troublingly attracted to this year's visiting resident scholar, recruited by his father from an American university. Oliver is 24, breezy and spontaneous, and at work on a book about Heraclitus. The young men loll about in bathing suits, play tennis, jog along the Italian Riviera and flirt. Both also flirt (and more) with women among their circle of friends, but Elio, who narrates, yearns for Oliver. so well written, very descripted one of the best gay literature books ive read in a long long time, will most def give it a second reading"
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