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Call Me By Your Name

André aciman, ask litcharts ai: the answer to your questions.

Elio spends each summer with his academic parents in the small Italian village of B. Each year, the family hosts young American scholars who come to live in Italy while working on a book project. When Elio is seventeen, his family invites a twenty-four-year-old Columbia professor named Oliver to live with them for six weeks. Upon Oliver’s arrival, Elio is drawn to him but doesn’t quite understand why, taking special care to give him a nice tour of the town and paying close attention to the way he presents himself. He’s impressed by Oliver’s “billowy” shirt that opens onto his chest and the casual, confident way he moves through the world. At the same time, he also begins to resent Oliver’s relaxed attitude, which seems insulting. For instance, whenever Oliver leaves the house, he says “ Later! ”—a way of saying goodbye Elio has never heard and dislikes for its “indifference.”

Elio and Oliver make a habit of working together in the mornings by the pool. While Elio works on a musical score at the outdoor table, Oliver makes changes to his manuscript on a blanket in the grass. After lunch, he moves to the edge of the pool to read, saying, “This is heaven.” As such, he dubs this spot “heaven,” or the orle of paradise . Each day, Elio watches him luxuriate, periodically asking if he’s asleep. When Oliver isn’t dozing, he makes conversation with Elio, asking what he’s thinking about or talking to him about complex academic ideas, always impressed by Elio’s ability to engage in sophisticated intellectual conversations. Often, their conversations take sudden turns and become emotionally charged, as Elio constantly tries to determine the best thing to say and is sometimes offended by Oliver’s mood swings—one moment, Oliver will be playful and encouraging, and the next he’ll be cold and uninterested, gazing at Elio with a “chilly” look.

Eventually, Elio comes to understand that he’s attracted to Oliver, but he can’t bring himself to act upon his feelings. Instead, he tries to hide his emotions while simultaneously hoping Oliver will do something to acknowledge the energy flowing between them. At the same time, though, he balks whenever Oliver gives him an opportunity to reveal his feelings. One day, for instance, Oliver comes up behind him on the tennis court, throws an arm around him and with the other massages his shoulder, saying he seems tight. Elio is instantly overwhelmed and shrinks from Oliver’s touch. “A moment longer and I would have slackened,” he notes. Taken aback, Oliver apologizes, saying he must have pinched a nerve, though Elio later realizes that he must have seen through this act. “Knowing, as I later came to learn, how thoroughly trenchant was his ability to sort contradictory signals, I have no doubt that he must have already suspected something,” he writes.

Elio’s preoccupation with Oliver continues throughout the summer. Before long, Oliver starts partying with locals. He even strikes up a romantic relationship with a girl named Chiara , who’s closer in age to Elio. Around this time, Elio starts paying such close attention to Oliver’s moods that he ascribes different “personalities” to each of his four bathing suits: red means he’s “bold, set in his ways, very grown-up, almost gruff and ill-tempered”; yellow means he’s “sprightly, buoyant, funny, not without barbs”; green means he’s “acquiescent, eager to learn, eager to speak, sunny”; and blue is the color he has worn whenever he has showed Elio affection and attention, like when he massaged his shoulder or stepped into his bedroom from their shared balcony or picked up a glass Elio dropped in the grass and said, when Elio told him he didn’t have to do that, that he did it because he wanted to.

While hanging out in town one night with friends, Elio sees Oliver and Chiara walking arm-in-arm. Although Elio and Oliver have been avoiding each other at home—the tension between them palpable—they have a short conversation, disguising their feelings through small talk that they refract through Chiara and the other people present. Despite this roundabout way of communicating, Elio is delighted when Oliver delivers a veiled compliment to him before leaving. Later that night, Elio spends time with a girl named Marzia , who is very obviously attracted to him. “You’re not with me because you’re angry with Chiara?” she asks as they skinny dip in the dark ocean. “Why am I angry with Chiara?” he replies, and she says, “Because of him.” He assures her he doesn’t know what she’s talking about, and when they put their clothes on again, he kisses her and tells her to meet him at this spot the following night. She agrees and leaves, though not before instructing him not to tell anybody about their plans.

“We almost did it,” Elio tells his father and Oliver the following day during breakfast. His father asks why they didn’t, and Elio says he doesn’t know, so Oliver says, “Try again later.” Then he adds, “If not later, when?” This phrase haunts Elio, as he applies it to their own relationship, ultimately adding a sense of urgency to their situation. As he turns the sentence over in his mind, he wonders if Oliver has “found [him] out and uncovered each and every one of [his] secrets with those four cutting words.”

Finally, when he can’t take it any longer, Elio expresses his feelings for Oliver. “Do you know what you’re saying?” Oliver asks. “Yes,” Elio replies, “I know what I’m saying and you’re not mistaking any of it.” Having spoken so directly, he waits as Oliver runs inside to visit his translator. When he returns, though, it’s as if the conversation has died away. “I wish I hadn’t spoken,” he says after a while. “I’m going to pretend you never did,” Oliver responds, eventually saying they “can’t talk about such things.”

On the way back from town, Elio leads Oliver to one of his favorite places: Monet’s Berm, where Monet used to paint. Putting their bikes down, they continue their conversation, though they avoid speaking straightforwardly about the fact that they’re attracted to one another. Nonetheless, Oliver eventually admits he has known how Elio feels for a long time, despite how hard Elio has tried to hide it. Then, as if testing the waters, Oliver slides close and gently kisses Elio. “Better now?” he asks, but Elio doesn’t answer because he’s “not so sure” he enjoyed the kiss as much as he’d “expected,” so he decides to “test it again,” this time pressing his lips more passionately to Oliver’s. After a moment, Oliver pulls away and says they should go. “So far we’ve behaved. We’ve been good. Neither of us has done anything to feel ashamed of. Let’s keep it that way,” he says. Considering this, Elio places his hand on Oliver’s crotch, but this doesn’t change anything, and the two ride home for lunch, during which Oliver slides his foot over Elio’s beneath the table. As he presses his sole against the top of Elio’s arch, Elio suddenly gets a nosebleed and has to leave the table. Later, Oliver visits him in his room and asks if the bleeding was his fault. “Are you going to be okay?” he asks. “I thought I was,” Elio says. “I’ll get over it.” That night, Oliver goes out and doesn’t come home until late; Elio is convinced he’s had sex with somebody else.

The following days are tense between Oliver and Elio. Nothing sexual happens between them, and Oliver spends a considerable amount of time with ten-year-old Vimini , a lovable young girl who lives nearby and has leukemia. Meanwhile, Elio advances his relationship with Marzia. At one point, she admits she thinks Elio will end up hurting her, though she kisses him back passionately when he presses her against a wall. Elio’s struck by Marzia’s simultaneous “boldness” and her “sorrow,” amazed that she can speak so straightforwardly about her hesitations and then reach down his pants. Even as he enjoys this moment, he composes a note in his head that he leaves for Oliver later that night. It reads: Can’t stand the silence. I need to speak to you . Oliver responds the next day with his own note, which says: Grow up. I’ll see you at midnight. When the time finally arrives, Elio sneaks into Oliver’s bed and they have sex. When Oliver penetrates him, the pain makes him consider stopping the entire thing. Oliver notices this and asks if he should stop, but Elio doesn’t respond, and he continues. At one point, Oliver leans down and says, “Call me by your name and I’ll call you by mine.”

Although Elio enjoys his experience in Oliver’s bed, something feels off in the aftermath of their lovemaking. Lying against the sheets, he feels disgusted and in pain, wanting more than anything to leave Oliver’s bedroom. He feels as if he doesn’t want to “remember” the experience—he didn’t “hate it,” but nor does he want to think about it. This feeling continues throughout the night and into the morning, and Elio is sure he’ll never again want to sleep with Oliver, though by midday he finds himself flirting with Oliver in a way that is much more sexually charged than before. They decide to have sex again that night. Shortly thereafter, Elio and Marzia go to the beach and have sex.

Elio and Oliver’s relationship intensifies in the last weeks of his stay in Italy. When it’s finally time for Oliver to leave, he invites Elio to come with him to Rome, where he will stay for several days in order to finish his book and meet with his publisher. Elio’s parents allow him to go, and the trip turns into a romantic getaway for the two young men, who relish their last few days together by having sex and partying with a group of vibrant intellectuals they meet at a reading. When Elio returns to B., he’s devastated to have said goodbye to Oliver, but he tries to “neutralize” this pain by “anticipating” it. Sensing this, his father—who has picked up on his feelings for Oliver—advises him to embrace the emotional pain. “To feel nothing so as not to feel anything—what a waste!” he says.

Over the next twenty years, Elio thinks only periodically of Oliver. When Oliver and his wife and kids visit Elio’s parents in Italy for Christmas one year, his mother calls him and puts Oliver on the phone. After only a moment, Oliver starts crying and hands the phone to Elio’s mother, and Elio’s surprised to find that he too is choked up. On another occasion, Elio visits the New England college town where Oliver teaches. Oliver insists that he come over for dinner, but Elio says he can’t—it’s too emotionally painful. Instead, they go for a drink at Elio’s hotel and discuss their past, both of them revealing that their relationship remains the most important love they’ve ever had. During yet another encounter, Oliver visits Italy and Elio takes him on a tour of the house, guiding him past the orle of paradise and other spots that remain the same. “I’m like you,” Oliver says at one point. “I remember everything.” Hearing this, Elio pauses and thinks that if Oliver truly remembers everything, then he should turn to him the next day before closing the taxi door and leaving, look him in the eye, and call him by his own name.

Call Me By Your Name

48 pages • 1 hour read

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Part 2, Pages 117-163

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Summary and Study Guide

Introduction

Call Me By Your Name by André Aciman is a piece of literary fiction in the subgenres of romance literature and queer literature. Published in 2007, the novel became a bestseller, received positive critical reception, and won the 2008  Lambda Literary Award for Gay Fiction. The 2017 film adaptation of Call Me By Your Name , directed by Luca Guadagnino and starring Timothée Chalamet and Armie Hammer, won, among other accolades, the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay.

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André Aciman is the author of a memoir and five novels, of which Call Me By Your Name is his debut. He published a sequel, Find Me , in 2019. Aciman was born and raised in Egypt, but his family left when he was a teenager due to rising tensions between Egypt and Israel. His family lived in Rome and Paris before moving to New York. His household spoke five languages including Italian and French, contributing to the multilingual nature of Aciman’s writing and as seen in Call Me By Your Name . He currently lives in New York City, where he teaches at CUNY Graduate Center.

This guide uses the 2011 Atlantic Books Kindle edition of Call Me By Your Name .

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Plot Summary

The narrator, Elio , seeks out a memory of his first real love, which took place during the summer when he was 17 years old.

Elio grows up with intellectual parents who host a young scholar working on their manuscript each summer in their holiday home in B., Italy. Elio is instantly attracted to this summer’s scholar, a handsome 24-year-old American man named Oliver , who studies the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus. Elio is self-conscious around Oliver and hyper-aware of his American slang and casual mannerisms. Elio second-guesses everything he says or does around Oliver, whom he finds impossibly mature and glamorous. Elio pines for Oliver with deep passion; he becomes fixated on Chiara, a girl in town who Oliver dates briefly, and is envious of the time Oliver spends gambling or partying in town without him. Elio tries hard to keep what he believes is an obvious attraction to Oliver a secret. While playing tennis, Oliver briefly massages Elio’s shoulder, and Elio shoves him off, eager to hide his attraction.

Elio finally tells Oliver about his feelings, and Oliver admits that he has also wanted Elio for the entire summer. Oliver is hesitant, however, to start a sexual relationship because Oliver worries he won’t control himself. Elio has never been with a man before, but Oliver has. After Elio shows Oliver Monet’s berm, a spot nearby where it is said Monet used to paint, they kiss. This leads to sex, which Elio at first doesn’t enjoy because it makes him feel ashamed. But Oliver teaches Elio how to enjoy the sexual component of their relationship. They fall in love and explore one another’s personal and physical boundaries. Elio goes through a sexual awakening at this time. He continues to have sex with Marzia , a girl his age in town, while secretly having sex with Oliver. Elio remains unsatiated; he masturbates into a peach because the peach reminds him of Oliver. Oliver eats from this peach, showing Elio that there is nothing Elio can do to embarrass himself. Thus, Oliver and Elio are free to be at their most vulnerable with each other.

Intrinsic to this relationship and attraction is Elio’s sense that Oliver is more like Elio than Elio himself. There is a paradoxical component to their relationship, in which shame and pleasure are intertwined and identities are replicable and replaceable. An intimate sentiment they share is to call one another by their own names, demonstrating that their love makes them one and the same.

Oliver brings Elio with him on a short trip to Rome. They attend a book party with a gregarious group of literati, who invite them out barhopping. Elio loves the ambiance of this group and relishes the freedom of being with Oliver in public in Rome. But their time together is short-lived because Oliver must return to New York City for his job at Columbia University. Elio’s father, who knows about their relationship and fully supports it, encourages Elio to devote himself to taking risks for love.

Oliver and Elio keep in touch through phone calls and letters, but their long-distance relationship loses the passion of their summer heat. Oliver returns to Italy to visit over the holiday break, but his engagement and impending summer marriage stop him from restarting a sexual relationship with Elio.

Years go by, and Elio moves on to other lovers. Oliver gets married and has children. They live separate lives but occasionally stay in touch. Fifteen years after their summer together, Elio visits Oliver at his university when Elio happens to be in town. They rehash their past and agree that their love had been good. Oliver wants to introduce Elio to his family, but a part of Elio is still in love with Oliver, so he worries it’ll be too much for him to meet Oliver’s wife and kids.

Five years later, Oliver visits B. again. Elio and Oliver walk to their past haunts, and Elio hopes that their relationship meant as much to Oliver as it did to him.

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Review: Call Me By Your Name – André Aciman

Despite the fact that in two weeks time, winter will officially be upon us in Sydney, the past week or so has seen the sort of balmy temperatures one might hope for during a UK summer. While the mornings are cooler; and the days shorter, the midday heat has been warm enough to justify an hour or two spent lounging on the beach, watching the ocean sparkle under the autumn sun. And thus it was, that before winter takes hold, and the days of sandy feet and sun-cooked skin are nothing but a distant memory that I wanted to squeeze in a read of André Aciman’s Call Me By Your Name. While I’m a voracious reader all year round, a book set on the Italian Riviera is best read in sunnier climes, rather than curled up in bed with the rain beating down against the window pane.

For me, the book was something of a slow starter, though that might be attributed to the fact that I was reading it sporadically to begin with; a couple of pages here, a chapter there. For as soon as I sat down without my phone, laptop, or to-do list as a distraction, I was immediately engrossed with Aciman’s heady tale of a restless summer romance.

The story follows seventeen-year-old Elio and his father’s American house guest Oliver during a hot and heady six weeks at the family’s cliffside Italian villa. When Elio and Oliver develop an unlikely friendship it soon develops into a love affair, made all the more intense due to the balmy Italian and very beautiful landscape that acts as a backdrop to their developing feelings. As the story progresses, their relationship intensifies, but alas the impending summer sojourn coming to an end presses upon them.

Ripe with poetic and powerful prose, Call Me By Your Name is an evocative and atmospheric story that sweeps its readers away to the sun-soaked shores of the Italian Riviera. An intoxicating tale of infatuation, intimacy and overwhelm and of love and the suffering that often ensues, Call Me By Your Name is a beautiful coming of age story that will resonate with readers of all ages and act as a reminder of the careless and intense sort of love that fades with the seasons, but is lasting and long-lived.

Call Me By Your Name Book Synopsis

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’ cliff-side mansion on the Italian Riviera. Unprepared for the consequences of their attraction, at first each feigns indifference. But during the restless summer weeks that follow, unrelenting buried currents of obsession and fear, fascination and desire, intensify their passion as they test the charged ground between them. What grows from the depths of their spirits is a romance of scarcely six weeks’ duration and an experience that marks them for a lifetime. For what the two discover on the Riviera and during a sultry evening in Rome is the one thing both already fear they may never truly find again: total intimacy.

The psychological maneuvers that accompany attraction have seldom been more shrewdly captured than in André Aciman’s frank, unsentimental, heartrending elegy to human passion.  Call Me by Your   Name  is clear-eyed, bare-knuckled, and ultimately unforgettable.

About André Aciman

André Aciman is Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature at the Graduate Center, CUNY and the director of The Writers’ Institute. He is the author of  Call Me by Your Name ,  Out of Egypt: A Memoir ,  False Papers ,  Alibis ,  Eight White Nights ,  Harvard Square , and  Enigma Variations . He is the co-author and editor of  Letters of Transit  and of  The Proust Project . André is the recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship as well as a fellowship from The New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers. He has written for publications including  The New York Times ,  The New Yorker ,  The New Republic ,  The New York Review of Books  and several volumes of  Best American Essays . He is currently working on a novel and a collection of essays.

After some further reading? I love this Call Me By Your Name book review from The New York Times. Looking for something a bit more in-depth? Have a read of this Call Me By Your Name book analysis .

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3 comments on “Review: Call Me By Your Name – André Aciman”

I saw the film in late-March 2018 and it immediately became my favourite movie of all time. Everything about it was absolutely 100% beautiful and there were a lot of things about the story and the characters that I could directly relate to. After I watched the film, I ran out and bought the book – I had heard that the book jumps ahead 15-20 years and I was desperate to find out what had happened between Elio and Oliver.

I don’t often cry whilst reading, but the final chapter of Call Me By Your Name had me crying like A BABY! I absolutely loved it, just as much as I did the movie. What an incredible story 🙂

Thanks for stopping by Vanessa! I agree, it really is such a beautiful book, and the last chapter is very moving indeed. How does the film compare? I’ve heard great things about it but not from someone who’s read the book as well and I’m always nervous about watching the film of a book I’ve adored xo

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Call Me By Your Name

By andre aciman, call me by your name study guide.

Considered one of the defining works of contemporary gay literature, Call Me By Your Name is a coming-of-age-story and romantic novel that meditates on time, desire, and the intensity of the experiences that punctuate our lives and leave a permanent imprint on our memory. Aciman’s debut novel received critical acclaim for its treatment of themes such as sexuality and obsessive love; it won the 2008 Lambda Literary Award for Gay Fiction.

As a romance novel, Call Me By Your Name sets itself apart with its nuanced depiction of both the anticipation leading up to a romantic affair, and the emotional complexity that results after attaining a life-defining relationship.

Its influences include Aciman’s own familiarity with Italy and Italian culture, as well as the nuanced differences of American culture, since the author grew up both in Rome and New York City. His expertise in comparative literature comes through in the myriad of texts referenced throughout the novel, from the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus to the Jewish German-language poet, Paul Celan.

A film adaptation of the novel, directed by Luca Guadagnino, was released on November 24, 2017, to critical acclaim, winning the prize of Best Adapted Screenplay at the 90th Academy Awards.

Call Me By Your Name Questions and Answers

The Question and Answer section for Call Me By Your Name is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.

Elio’s thoughts

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The Names Of Oliver's Children

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Study Guide for Call Me By Your Name

Call Me By Your Name study guide contains a biography of author Andre Aciman, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

• About Call Me By Your Name
• Call Me By Your Name Summary
• Character List

Essays for Call Me By Your Name

Call Me By Your Name literature essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of Call Me By Your Name by Andre Aciman.

• Elio’s Feelings Through The Form And Structure in Call Me by Your Name, by André Aciman

Lesson Plan for Call Me By Your Name

• About the Author
• Study Objectives
• Common Core Standards
• Introduction to Call Me By Your Name
• Relationship to Other Books
• Bringing in Technology
• Notes to the Teacher
• Related Links
• Call Me By Your Name Bibliography

Wikipedia Entries for Call Me By Your Name

• Introduction
• Early life and education
• Out of Egypt
• Personal life

• study guides
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Call Me by Your Name Summary & Study Guide

Call Me by Your Name Summary & Study Guide Description

The following version of this book was used to create this guide: Andre Aciman, Call Me By Your Name (Atlantic Books, 2011), Kindle AZW file.

Call Me By Your Name, by André Aciman, charts an intense six week period in the lives of Elio, an Italian teenager, and Oliver, an American academic, as they fall in love over the course of a summer in Italy. After they go their separate ways, the memory of their time together reverberates throughout the rest of their lives. Told entirely from the perspective of Elio, the narrative is an intensely emotional reminiscence of Oliver’s time in Italy. The novel focuses on Elio’s obsessive analysis of the details of Oliver’s words and behaviors. Elio’s sensitivity and emotional responses are contrasted throughout with Oliver’s apparently cooler and more detached personality.

In Part 1, Elio recalls when Oliver first arrived at his family’s house in Italy. Elio’s father hosted a different academic each summer to provide him with administrative support and allow the academic time to work on his or her book. When Oliver arrived, Elio instantly began trying to impress him but felt that Oliver responded to his overtures with coldness and hostility. Nevertheless, the two men began spending a lot of time together and Elio developed an intense sexual obsession with Oliver. Elio believed that Oliver was dating a local woman named Chiara, although Oliver insisted that he was mistaken.

In Part 2, Elio began dating a woman named Marzia. Unable to cope with the strength of his preoccupation with Oliver, Elio confessed his feelings. Oliver kissed Elio but insisted that nothing could ever happen between them. After the kiss, Oliver and Elio spoke less frequently, much to Elio’s distress. Elio sent Oliver a note telling him that he was desperate to speak to him and Oliver suggested they meet at midnight. At midnight, Elio went to Oliver’s room and they had sex. Initially, Elio felt ashamed and anxious about what had happened between them but he soon became more comfortable and was happy with the nature of their relationship. They shared memories of when they first met and revealed the mistaken conclusions that the other had drawn. Oliver invited Elio to join him on a trip to Rome before he left Italy at the end of the summer.

Part 3 took place in Rome. Oliver and Elio attended a poetry reading and Elio was introduced to a wide circle of artists and intellectuals. Elio felt happy and grateful to be able to spend time with such interesting people. After the poetry reading, everyone went to a restaurant together and the poet told stories about what events in his life had inspired his poems. They moved on to a bar and Elio played the piano for the others. Elio began to feel unwell and Oliver followed him into the street where Elio was sick. The two men wandered through the streets of Rome together singing and kissing.

In Part 4, Elio returned alone to his family’s villa. He spoke to Oliver on the phone when he got back to the United States. Oliver revealed that he had stolen a postcard from Elio’s room as a memento of their time together and promised to visit at Christmas. At Christmas, Oliver visited and informed Elio that he was getting married. Fourteen years later, Elio decided to visit Oliver at the college where he worked. Oliver still had the postcard he had taken from Elio. Elio had dinner with Oliver and his family. Years later, Oliver visited the villa in Italy once again and the two men shared their memories.

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By Stacey D’Erasmo

• Feb. 25, 2007

This novel is hot. A coming-of-age story, a coming-out story, a Proustian meditation on time and desire, a love letter, an invocation and something of an epitaph, “Call Me by Your Name” is also an open question. It is an exceptionally beautiful book that cannot quite bring itself to draw the inevitable conclusion about axis-shifting passion that men and women of the world might like to think they will always reach — that that obscure object of desire is, by definition, ungraspable, indeterminate and already lost at exactly the moment you rush so fervently to hold him or her. The heat is in the longing, the unavailability as we like to say, the gap, the illusion, etc. But what André Aciman considers, elegantly and with no small amount of unbridled skin-to-skin contact, is that maybe the heat of eros isn’t only in the friction of memory and anticipation. Maybe it’s also in the getting. In a first novel that abounds in moments of emotional and physical abandon, this may be the most wanton of his moves: his narrative, brazenly, refuses to stay closed. It is as much a story of paradise found as it is of paradise lost.

The literal story is a tale of adolescent sexual awakening, set in the very well-appointed home of an academic, on the Italian Riviera, in the mid-1980s. Elio, the precocious 17-year-old son of the esteemed and open-minded scholar and his wife, falls fast and hard for Oliver, a 24-year-old postdoc teaching at Columbia, who has come to the mansion for six weeks to revise his manuscript — on Heraclitus, since this is a novel about time and love — before publication. Elio is smart, nervous, naïve, but also bold; Oliver is handsome, seductive and breezily American, given to phrases like “Later,” and abundantly “O.K. with” many things Elio is less O.K. with — O.K. with being Jewish, “with his body, with his looks, with his antic backhand, with his choice of books, music, films, friends.” From the first page, we know we’re in the crumbling terrain of memory. “I shut my eyes, say the word, and I’m back in Italy,” Elio writes from some later vantage point. Which is also, of course, to say: I am not in Italy now, I am not that young man, what I am going to describe is long over. Heraclitus, indeed.

The younger Elio has apparently been more or less heterosexual until Oliver arrives, but in fewer than 15 pages he’s already in a state he calls the “swoon.” He lies around on his bed in the long Mediterranean afternoons hoping Oliver will walk in, feeling “fire like fear, like panic, like one more minute of this and I’ll die if he doesn’t knock at my door, but I’d sooner he never knock than knock now. I had learned to leave my French windows ajar, and I’d lie on my bed wearing only my bathing suit, my entire body on fire. Fire like a pleading that says, Please, please, tell me I’m wrong, tell me I’ve imagined all this, because it can’t possibly be true for you as well, and if it’s true for you too, then you’re the cruelest man alive.”

But it is true for Oliver, and he does knock, and then things really heat up. What Elio and Oliver do to a peach, for instance, might have made T. S. Eliot take a match to “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” Aciman, who has written so exquisitely about exile, loss and Proust in his book of essays, “False Papers,” and his memoir, “Out of Egypt,” is no less exquisite here in his evocation of Elio’s adoration for the lost city of Oliver’s body and the lost city of the love between the two men. He builds these lost cities with the extraordinary craftsmanship of obsession, carefully imagining every last element of Elio’s affair with Oliver, depicting even the slightest touches and most mundane conversations with a nearly hyper-real attention to how, exactly, each one articulated a desire in Elio that felt “like coming home, like asking, Where have I been all my life?” Aciman never curbs or mocks Elio’s unabashed adolescent romanticism, never wheels in repressive social forces to crush the lovers, never makes one the agent of the other’s ruin. Even Elio’s father is fairly “que será, será” about what he suspects has been going on (a lot) under his scholarly roof.

What unwinds the men from each other’s embrace is none of these clichés; instead, Aciman, Proustian to the core, moves them apart, renders their beautiful city Atlantis, with the subtlest, most powerful universal agent: time. Nobody gets clocked with a tire iron. No one betrays the other. One becomes ordinary and marries; the other’s romantic fate is vague but seems to be more patchy. They meet again, 15 years later, and they’re not tragic; all they are is older. The fully adult Elio thinks, “This thing that almost never was still beckons, I wanted to tell him.” They “can never undo it, never unwrite it, never unlive it, or relive it. ... Going back is false. Moving ahead is false. Looking the other way is false.” In a book that seems to wear its heart on its sleeve, this openhanded, open-ended gesture is also its most knowing, challenging moment. That the city of desire is a scrim, all “dream making and strange remembrance,” Aciman seems to say, doesn’t mean it would be any less false not to walk into it. And if the novel is mourning this city, it is also, brick by brick, rebuilding it before the reader’s eyes.

In his essay “Pensione Eolo,” Aciman writes, “Ultimately, the real site of nostalgia is not the place that was lost or the place that was never quite had in the first place; it is the text that must record that loss.” In other words, Elio and Oliver might give each other up, but the book that conjures them doesn’t give up either one. In fact, it brings them back together, reunites them, for a glorious endless summer. In the book, the river can be revisited. The closing words echo the title: a phrase simultaneously of elegy and of invitation.

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Call Me By Your Name: Book Review

Call Me By Your Name by André Aciman

For those looking for a last minute summer book, Andre Aciman’s debut novel Call Me By Your Name makes for the perfect read. Aciman’s depiction of summer in Italy coupled with the novel’s themes of nostalgia capture the mood of August’s last weeks.

Filled with intimate descriptions of both inner passions and surrounding charm, Call Me By Your Name reaches deep into the doubts and experiences of its teenage protagonist to deliver a story of fulfillment and selfhood. The novel offers an unique perspective on both love and the coming-of-age genre, while reaching beyond the relationship at its core to comment on human nature and youth. 

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9780312426781

André Aciman

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

22 January 2008

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Film Review: ‘Call Me by Your Name’

'I Am Love' director Luca Guadagnino weaves a beguiling tale of first love, as Armie Hammer and Timothée Chalamet share a steamy Italian summer

By Peter Debruge

Peter Debruge

Chief Film Critic

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As numerous are the ways in which Luca Guadagnino ’s latest (and most personal) film, “ Call Me by Your Name ,” advances the canon of gay cinema, none impresses more than the fact that it’s not necessarily a gay movie at all — at least, not in the sense of being limited to LGBT festivals and audiences. Rather, the “I Am Love” director’s ravishingly sensual new film, adapted from André Aciman’s equally vivid coming-out/coming-of-age novel, is above all a story of first love — one that transcends the same-sex dynamic of its central couple, much as “Moonlight” has.

Acquired by Sony Pictures Classics shortly before its Sundance premiere, this Proustian account of an Italo-American 17-year-old’s transformative summer may not be as commercial as “Moonlight,” but it ought to be a word-of-mouth art-house hit all the same — especially when talk turns to what teenage Elio Perlman (Timothée Chalamet) and American summer guest Oliver ( Armie Hammer ) do with a ripe peach.

Had the film been made in 1983, when the book is set, or 2007, when it was published, the steamy forbidden-fruit scene would surely have landed an NC-17 rating. Today, neither audiences nor the MPAA seem quite so squeamish about such demonstrations of passion, no matter how nontraditional. If anything, the scandalous moment should only help the film to reach its fullest potential audience — as will its sun-blissed Northern Italy location.

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Embracing the spirit, if not the letter of Aciman’s novel, Guadagnino and co-writers Walter Fasano and James Ivory (of the Merchant Ivory dynasty that brought us “Maurice” and “A Room With a View”) have resituated the action ever so slightly to Lombardy. The film takes place at the Perlmans’ vacation home, a spacious old villa not unlike the one seen in the Patricia Highsmith-esque, Guadagnino-produced short “Diarchy.” Every summer, Elio’s professor father (Michael Stuhlbarg) hires a promising young doctoral student to assist with his research. This year, the Jewish family’s house guest is a 24-year-old golden boy of the kind that might once have graced the pages of Physique Pictorial magazine.

Oliver’s arrival stirs something in Elio, though the teen is slow to confront his feelings. On one hand, he’s compelled to spend as much time with the newcomer as possible, serving as his guide on bike rides to town and frequent trips to the local swimming hole. At the same time, he’s protective of his own feelings, unsure how to read Oliver’s casual American attitude (the way his hand caresses Elio’s shoulder, or the aloof “Later” with which he signs off every conversation).

Though viewers are sure to read much into the strange chemistry taking shape between Elio and Oliver, Guadagnino concentrates his attention on the surface: a freshly prepared Italian breakfast, tree branches heavy with ripe fruit, the glowing sun on honeyed skin. But even as he indulges our senses with such details, the subtext becomes impossible to ignore.

Though Elio and his family have spent many a summer in Lombardy, something is different about this one — that much is clear in the way Elio interacts with longtime girlfriend Marzia (Esther Garrel). They’ve known each other since childhood and are so comfortable around one another, it seems a logical next step that they might choose to lose their virginity with one another. But Elio holds back temporarily, bragging to Oliver that he and Marzia could have had sex after a late-night swim, just to see what kind of reaction it gets.

Oliver is interested, but is clearly wary of acting on his desires, since Elio is not only inexperienced, but also his boss’ son. This seductive outsider correctly anticipates that anything physical that might happen between him and Elio will have a lasting impact on the young man’s sexual identity. And yet, the pair brazenly peacock for one another, parading around shirtless and leaving the doors to their shared bathroom ajar — an improvised mating ritual echoed by a low insect buzz that fills the soundtrack.

As played by Hammer, Oliver is the smoldering embodiment of cocky self-confidence, and yet, there’s an endearing vulnerability in the way he needs for Elio to make the first move — setting the tempo for the deliciously tentative courtship dance between them. Meanwhile, relative newcomer Chalamet combines the intellectual precocity and hot-blooded animal energy of a young Louis Garrel, circa “the Dreamers,” distinguishing himself via the character’s mastery of three languages (English, French, and Italian) and two musical instruments (guitar and piano).

As Elio and Oliver’s attraction become more brazen, the question remains how much of their “special friendship” registers with Elio’s parents. The boy’s mother (Amira Casar) certainly picks up on the impact Oliver has had on her son, even going so far as to suggest that the two spend a few days alone together before Oliver ships off to New Jersey. As for Elio’s father, Guadagnino has done justice to one of the book’s key passages, crafting an exquisite scene in which Stuhlbarg’s character bares his soul via a terrific monologue delivered after the boy returns home — putting to rest a question subtly raised earlier in the film, when a homoerotic slide show doubles as a hesitant proposition of sorts.

No matter how intellectually progressive the Perlman family is, no father has ever said something so open-minded and eloquent to his son, and yet, the film offers this conversation as a gift to audiences who might have desperately needed to hear it in their own lives. This splendid conversation makes such an impact, the film could have ended there (the novel follows the characters for years more), though Guadagnino does supply a bittersweet coda that implies how the two leads look back on that summer — further suggesting that the film isn’t a literal rendering of Elio’s experience, but a bittersweet embellishment of his memory. These were the days that shaped him, marked by the intense tastes, textures, and odors that Guadagnino so effectively amplifies for the viewer’s benefit.

Back in Italy, some critics have held Guadagnino’s work in advertising and brand promotions against him, whereas here in the States, audiences hold no such grudges, responding instead to the director’s cinematic virtuosity. Even as he beguiles us with mystery, Guadagnino recreates Elio’s life-changing summer with such intensity that we might as well be experiencing it first-hand. It’s a rare gift that earns him a place in the pantheon alongside such masters of sensuality as Pedro Amodóvar and François Ozon, while putting “Call Me by Your Name” on par with the best of their work.

Reviewed at Sundance Film Festival (Premieres), Jan. 22, 2017. Running time: 132 MIN.

• Production: A Sony Pictures Classics release of a RT Features, Frenesy Film Co., La Cinéfacture production. (International sales: Memento Films, Paris.) Producers: Peter Spears, Luca Guadagnino, Emilie Georges, Rodrigo Teixeira, Marco Morabito. Executive producers: James Ivory, Howard Rosenman, Tom Dolby, Naima Abed, Nicholas Kaiser, Lourenço Sant'Anna, Sophie Mas, Francesco Melzi d'Eril, Derek Simonds, Margarethe Baillou.
• Crew: Director: Luca Guadagnino. Screenplay, James Ivory, Guadagnino, Walter Fasano. Camera (color, widescreen): Sayombhu Mukdeeprom. Editor: Walter Fasano. Music: Sufjan Stevens.
• With: Armie Hammer, Timothée Chalamet, Michael Stuhlbarg, Amira Casar, Esther Garrel, Victoire Du Bois, Vanda Capriolo, Antonio Rimoldi, Elena Bucci, Marco Sgrosso.

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Everything you need to know about

Call me by your name.

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This novel is hot. – NYT

• NY Times: “Suddenly One Summer”

André Aciman’s Call Me By Your Name – a steamy, intellectual, homoerotic novel set in a small Italian town. Now, a decade after the book’s publication, a film by the same name, written by James Ivory and directed by the Italian Luca Guadagnino.

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