Review Of Call Me By Your Name By André Aciman

Call Me By Your Name is a novel by André Aciman, published by Atlantic Books. It was first published on January 23rd 2007. This italian summer romance between two men features themes of obsession, passion, love, and youth. It effectively taught lessons on love and self-discovery to its audience. The audience is able to connect with all the emotions evoked and expressed in this book at a very personal level. A true lesson was taught on how to handle feelings, especially that of love and passion towards lovers and romantic experiences.

This novel was electrically sensual and filled to the brim with feelings and self discovery which every human being has experienced or will experience. It’s summer in the mid 1980’s, some place in the Italian Riviera, the precocious and bolshie 17-year-old Elio Perlman falls fast and hard for Oliver, the 24-year-old statuesque postdoc professor from Columbia in America. The breezy American has come to live with Elio’s family to modify his manuscript on Heraclitus before publication. The first page opens with Elio’s first person thoughts and his memories from a later point of time in his life; “I shut my eyes, say the word, and I’m back in Italy,” Elio is intelligent, sensitive, naïve, and youthfully bold; Oliver is good-looking, alluring and is more experienced than Elio. The way in which Aciman wrote this story into paper kept readers enthralled. His use of bold and vague descriptions as opposed to more direct and straightforward language. Through this, his work becomes more realistic and relatable to the audience as not everything is not direct and handed to someone. He utilises this when Elio confesses his feelings to Oliver by the shoreline.

Aciman does so without making Elio outrightly say the words “I love you” or anything openly affectionate. Despite the difficulty, he was still able to effectively make a more powerful and relatable 5-6 pages of the scene, explicitly describing Elio’s feelings and thoughts with pinpoint and vivid precision. This is prominent when Elio says; “If you only knew how little i know about the things that really matter. ” and when Oliver asked why Elio was telling him this “Because I thought you should know”. This style of writing allows for the readers to fill in the lines and truly make them feel as if they too were present. In conclusion, salacious italian summer romance was the perfect tranquil hedonism. Expertly written in Elio’s point of view, a recollection of all his memories from that summer at his family mansion in Italy, many years after the events took place. This novel effectively translates a mysterious love story with highly relatable scenes which strongly resonates within the audience. It leaves the readers moved, confused, highly emotionally tied and attached to all things Call Me By Your Name.