André Aciman's "Call me by your name" --- a review

(It's not the first time we're trying to write a review of Aciman's 2007 novel, so let's see how far we get this time:)

The tone of the typical Call-me-by-your-name (CMBYN) review is well-rehearsed enthusiasm about a love story between two men that doesn't completely end in tears. Okay, let's take that back, there are lots of lucid, ambiguous reviews that are essentially saying the same thing we are trying to say, so bear with us. For benchmark fans, CMBYN is rated 4.08 (out of 5) on Goodreads, whereas Flaubert's Madame Bovary is rated 3.64---perhaps Aciman a scholar of French literature can explain why.

CMBYN: Elio, 17, only scion of an "expat" Jewish couple settled in Italy, falls in love with Oliver, 24, an American scholar who's about to finish his Ph.D. about Heraclitus, the pre-Socratic philosopher. Oliver has been invited to spend six weeks in the Arcadian setting of the family's summer home on the Amalfi coast, a spot stylishly overlooking the beach where Percey Bhysse Shelley's body had been washed ashore after a stormy sailing encounter with a vicious summer squall back in XXX. It takes a little while before Elio and Oliver agree on their terms of endearment (ca. 50% of the text), then enjoy a spell of unconditional love-making (ca. 25%) , and are finally separated by Oliver's obligations back at NY's Columbia U. and his decision to return into the arms of his sometimes fiancée. There's a coda to the book which is one of its problems.

Aciman has managed to write a text that's seamlessly blending unapologetic sex with highbrow eroticism and mainstream literary fiction. Or he has written the best essay ever about desire dressed up as fiction, and what he's done is possibly quite unique. Yours truly at least, a middling reader, has never seen it done before. Anaïs Nin comes to mind, but Aciman does it better.

You read the book as an essay about desire, it's up the with Ovid possibly. But we won't read it as such because we read too many essays at Elio's vulnerable age. So we read it the way it's presented, as literary fiction. (Lot's of essays should be replaced by MRI brain studies, we've come to think since we graduated from Elio's vulnerable age.)

Literary fiction then. A gay reader who's addicted to happy endings can't simply get over the fact that there is no such ending. Exclamation mark.

So we're heavily biased. And the coda really stinks. But let's enjoy the DESIRE first. Half of the book is about a delayed fuck. It begins in the sixth paragraph, if not earlier:

"I was going for [Oliver's] devious smile that would suddenly light up his face each time he'd read my mind, when all I really wanted was skin, just skin." (p. 8)

In one of our erotic handsheets we've eternalized the main quotes already, but here are a few more:


   on account of the fact that Elio seems to feel his cock as soon as he's becoming aware of the American visitor:


  because we're informed almost immediately that Elio wants one thing in particular, Oliver's skin:

In the first half of the book Elio and Oliver have yet to clutch each others cocks (Aciman has a preference for the term "cock" above the term "dick"), so we have to rely of Elio's fantasies for a while. The first invocation of sex is perhaps the best. He ccc about for xx paragraphs, and the says:  but we are not disappointed.      ir