[Book Review] Call Me By Your Name: 'yearning' is the best word

There are other ways of showing love instead of simply saying it.

Andre Aciman's 2007 novel "Call Me By Your Name" is about to get a film adaptation to be released on November 2017.

It tells the story of Elio, a 17-year-old Jewish boy, whose family has a tradition of inviting scholars into their home in a span of six weeks to help them finish their manuscripts. This has been going on for 15 years, and Elio must once again offer his room to a stranger and take refuge in his dead grandfather's bedroom.

The next in line for the summer residency program is 24-year-old Oliver, a sociable scholar admired by folks for saying "Later!" instead of goodbyes, which according to Elio, is "harsh, curt, and dismissive." Little did Oliver know that it was Elio who chose him to be their next guest.

In this premise, the issue of age enters the narrative.

But before doubts may be casted, it should be considered that the characters here are, for the most part, intellectual. The first person narrative has its moments of dullness and gullibility, but Elio's perspective has reached depths that prove age does not equate to maturity.

In his eyes, the reader can still pinpoint cheap childish romantic fantasies; the one where infatuation blurs reality and intuitive supposition. Understandable with his age, but the way Aciman wrote the character's eyes develops a story that makes these "childish" emotions deeper. Criticizing it for its immaturity is simply a failure to look at a bigger picture.

Perhaps the most compelling part of his narrative begins on the development of his motivations.

For the first quarter of this novel, Elio's motivations are directed towards physicality — it was about the face (Elio chose Oliver to be the next intern), or the skin, that caught his attention.

"Open shirt collar, Billowy, long hair, the dash of a movie star unwillingly snapped by a paparazzo. No wonder I’d stared at it."

But the superficial is normal in first meetings, and Elio had not put an emphasis on how each body part made his nipples hard or his cock erect. Nope. It was not about Oliver's eyes, or the skin of his hands, or his flawless feet, or his curved body; not about whatever erotic features his body can offer. Or maybe it was, too.

Along the way as he guided Oliver through town, Elio found himself trying to win him over despite disliking how brazen and extroverted Oliver seemed to be.

Call Me By Your Name, directed by Luca Guadagnino starring
Armie Hammer as Oliver and Timothee Chalamet as Elio

All the while his infatuation grew, so was his affection towards Oliver.

One of the most bothering parts of the novel is when you don't know what Oliver is thinking. You figure out later in the novel the cause for his actions, but you just never know if it aligns with his thoughts in that exact moment.

As a reader, you try to consider his age. Here was a scholar in graduate school, and has taught students too. Elio is seventeen and Oliver is twenty four. That's a seven-year gap. 

Then you see him testing the shallow waters of flirting; playing hide-and-seek. Hide feelings and seek if the other has. This is the issue they had on the first few days of his stay. Both were aloof. Both were trying to send signals. And thus, it results to a slow pacing.

But the way it was written does not elicit boredom, no. 

Judaism also plays a key role in ramping up Elio's interest. Seeing a man who boldly wears the Star of David on his neck, just like Elio, kindled the spiritual aspect of his affection. 

Reading Aciman's novel is like reading poetry, too. The symbols that you had to decipher, the relevance of one variable from another, and how he integrated these into the personality of his main character shows his mastery of the first person narrative. It reveled on the inner workings of the character while leaving bits of interpretation available.

As such, the best example is how Oliver devoured a fruit to show how he accepted the entirety of Elio. And how they both became one. And how eating this fruit may also just be a gesture to hype sexual adrenaline. And how Oliver isn't some old dude trying to take advantage of Elio's indecisiveness.

By the end of the novel, the reader can only feel a special yearning; that despite knowing it might not end well, the feeling still clings on even after twenty years forward.

Call Me By Your Name does not have a special story to offer. In fact, it shares the same plot lines as with a lot of gay fiction both in film and in literature. But what makes Andre Aciman's novel a wonder in itself is how it capitalized on its strength; to show how one starts from loving the what, and, caught unaware, begins to love how.

©The Pink Merman 

Pacific-Atlantis Mermen Journal 

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