Call Me by Your Name

Like pretty much every Taylor Swift song, this book made me feel big emotions.

Over the course of one summer in Italy, the main character, Elio, falls in love with a visiting scholar named Oliver. It’s a gay love story filled with all the tension, heat, and anguish that accompanies first love.

It brought me back to my own experiences of falling in love for the first time when every exchange and every gesture felt latent with meaning. 

We all remember our first love, and if we experience that first love as a teenager, the pain, the euphoria, the intensity is particularly unforgettable.

Reading Call Me by Your Name, a same-sex affair between a teen and an older grad student, plunged me back into that horrible, awful, wonderful time when I discovered love.  We all want to hold onto it even after it’s gone, to recapture something that can never be recaptured.

Andre Aciman dissects each and every emotion in lush, haunting prose, and even though the ending is bittersweet, how can it be any other way?… show more.

This book is the story of 17-year-old Elio’s summer romance with Oliver, a 24-year-old American scholar who stays at his family's Italian villa. It is achingly sensual, filled with longing, and the bittersweet knowledge that this once-in-a-lifetime affair will be short-lived. It is a relationship that will usher one teenager over the threshold into exquisitely painful adulthood.

Precocious and sensitive, Elio is leaving childhood behind in ways that are exciting, erotic, and welcome… even if he’s fully aware that such an intense passion can’t blaze forever. 

The author, for whom Italy has always been a dream, sat down over a period of a few months and poured out this sensual, emotional novel about a love affair of two young men. He never intended to write such book, which proves my theory that we novelists are sometimes the bewildered recipients of the tales sent to us. 

Again, it is the pull between Oliver and Elio which fascinates me. When Elio thinks back on the relationship many years later, Aciman writes some of the most beautiful passages in literature. The page shimmers, the words rise, and the story… show more.

Elio’s passion made me love him as well as the love he and Oliver intensely shared. Young, pensive, and winsome, Elio would have gone to the end of time to continue to experience a love that is so personal—so intimate and special. What he felt, we all have felt, or one day, hope to feel. This connection to me is powerful beyond the perfect words Acimen chose throughout. This power makes the characters and their desires as real as the air we breathe and the water we drink.

Aciman deftly moves a relationship full of desire, fear, sorrow, and all… show more.

This winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Fiction is one of the greatest love stories I have read – and also seen, since it was made into an equally compelling movie. Oliver arrives on the Italian Riviera to spend the summer assisting Professor Perlman on his academic research. He lives with the Perlman family and soon becomes close friends with their adolescent son, Elio. Their friendship evolves into a love affair that tests their sexuality as they move closer to total intimacy. It’s a story that lingers. I still get emotional thinking about it.

I am convinced that most grown-ups forget and then minimize the intensity of teen heartbreak. It has a special impact on boy teens, and this cuts across the assumption that relationships matter more to girls than to boys. Call Me by Your Name depicts the suffering of a 17-year-old teen who experiences heartbreak in the context of pressing questions about his sexuality and identity. It is a wonderful story and also a case study in the special vulnerability of late male adolescence, where myths about manhood threaten emotional expression. 

Call Me By Your Name is not just about two young men falling in love in a time and place of extreme homophobia. It’s also about nagging doubt, fear of rejection (from self and others), and illustrates the pain of finding everything you need before you realized what that was—and then how to cope when you lose it.