André Aciman’s "Call Me By Your Name"
The novel is a Proustian endeavor to remember a lost passion. Adolescent Elio falls in love with the young scholar, Oliver, a summer guest at his parents’ home on the Italian Riviera, and eventually finds Oliver returning his passion. The end of summer dictates the end of the relationship and, after a final fling in Rome, Oliver returns to the States, marries and has two children. I think the middle and last parts of the novel are stronger than the first. In the first, the other characters, such as Elio’s parents, never really come into focus. The use of Oliver’s customary curt reply “Later!” as a kind of leitmotif, perhaps modeled on Vinteuil’s musical phrase in Proust, becomes a little tiresome. The parry-and-thrust of flirtation and courtship is not particularly original. In the last part, the description of a book launch party in Rome, and the characters that flock to the event, is rich and deft. We see the author, a Poet, hungry for praise and hiding that hunger in vain. We see th...