He finds it impossible to overlook the new student, Oliver, whose golden looks and casual Americanisms rub Elio up the wrong way. Elio normally has little to do with the students: his days are filled with music, as he transcribes scores, writes pastiches of one composer in the manner of another, and spends his evenings up in B., hanging out with his friends and flirting with the girls. Each summer, his father hosts a visiting postdoc student who needs peace and quiet to finish their first book, and who earns their keep as his amanuensis. He comes home from school to his family’s sprawling villa near the town of B., where he and his parents spend their days swimming, sunbathing, having long, talkative lunches and playing tennis. Told in seventeen-year-old Elio’s pitch-perfect narrative voice, it’s a catalogue of human desires, flaws, hopes and lost dreams, so sumptuous that it leaves you aching with nostalgia and feeling drunk on beauty.Įlio’s summers have always followed a familiar pattern.

In one sense, it is a comfortable tale of beautiful, privileged people falling beautifully in love in beautiful surroundings but in Aciman’s hands it becomes much more than that. It is a poignant, intimate, irresistible story of a love affair which develops during an idyllic Italian summer between the precocious son of a college professor and his father’s visiting student. The film adaptation of this novel will be released tomorrow and is already causing critical waves, but I’m so glad I came to the book first. They haunt us for years and we can never quite shake off the memory of them, nor the deep ache they seem to cause. Call Me by Your Name is clear-eyed, bare-knuckled, and ultimately unforgettable.First loves are powerful things. The psychological maneuvers that accompany attraction have seldom been more shrewdly captured than in André Aciman’s frank, unsentimental, heartrending elegy to human passion. 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. 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. 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. Unprepared for the consequences of their attraction, at first each feigns indifference. 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.

Andre aciman call me by your name book