Call Me by Your Name: A Novel

Ich habe gerade den Roman zu lesen beendet und ich weiß gar nicht, wohin mit mir. Das sitzt richtig tief. Natürlich bin ich über den Film zu dem Buch gekommen, habe das Buch zuerst begonnen, zwischendurch den Film in einer Vorpremiere OmU sehen können und es jetzt, wie gesagt, beendet. Wie eine Rezensentin vor mir musste ich zwischendurch das Buch beiseitelegen, weil ich dann doch überwältigt wurde. Ich finde es auch nicht leicht zu lesen. Für mich persönlich wäre das keine Sommerlektüre für den Strand. Dazu ist es neben der ganzen Poesie auch einfach zu traurig und komplex. Und das nochmal eine Stufe intensiver als im Film, der ja erst gegen Ende so richtig zubeißt. Der Roman ist eine Introspektive und eine Erinnerung zwanzig Jahre zurück. "It is the first thing I remember about him, and I can hear it still today. Later! I shut my eyes, say the word, and I'm back in Italy, so many years ago, walking down the tree-lined driveway, watching him step out of the cab, billowy blue shirt, wide-open collar, sunglasses, straw hat, skin everywhere. Suddenly he's shaking my hand, handing me his backpack, removing his suitcase from the trunk of the cab, asking if my father is home." Den ganzen Roman bestimmt von Anfang an ein melancholisch-sehnsüchtiger Grundton, der sich bis zum Ende hält und sich eher noch steigert. Ein Sehnen, das nie zu Ende geht. Das ganze Leben lang. Letztlich geht es hier um die Wirkung der Zeit auf die Menschen und ihre Gefühle und darum, dass ein Paradies nur in der Erinnerung aufrechterhalten werden kann. Darum, wie immer wieder Teile der Persönlichkeit herausgerissen und immer neue Schichten darübergelegt wurden, wie bei einer sehr alten Kirche. Darum wie man sich dabei oberflächlich verändert oder die äußeren Bedingungen, aber vielleicht tief unter den neuen Schichten noch einen Rest Ihrer Liebe von damals entdeckt werden kann. Etwas, was sie geprägt hat, auf der sie sich alles gründet. Time makes us sentimental. Perhaps, in the end, it is because of time that we suffer. Das Buch ist in vier Kapitel eingeteilt und die Geschichte der beiden Männer wird aus subjektiver Sicht Elios erzählt im Rückblick 20 Jahre später. Im ersten trifft Elio (17) auf Oliver (24), den amerikanischen Doktoranden, der über sechs Wochen in Ihrem Haus in Italien verbringen soll, um dort zu arbeiten. Vom ersten Moment an richtet sich eine fast obsessive Aufmerksamkeit auf Oliver. Jeder Schritt, jede Aussage, jedes Verhalten Olivers wird analysiert und interpretiert, jede Stelle seines Körpers gescannt. Wir sind in Elios Kopf. Aber Oliver ist abweisend. Elio hasst ihn dafür aber im nächsten Moment verfällt er ihm wieder, sobald er von dem anderen etwas Aufmerksamkeit oder Zuspruch erfährt. Im zweiten und längsten Kapitel gesteht Elio nach ca. zwei Wochen der Qualen Oliver seine Empfindungen. Trotz Zögerns seitens Olivers...

Admittedly, this book starts out almost painfully slow, with a lead-up to the romance that's near torturous when accompanied by the main character and narrator's obsessive thoughts, with the only thing keeping the reader engaged the dangling promise that these two idiots will, eventually, get together. But once it gets going, oh boy does it get going. Let me preface my praises of this book by saying that I had a difficult, love-hate relationship with Elio (protagonist and narrator). His obsessive reading, re-reading, over-reading, over-re-reading into every little look, word, silence, and lack of look, borders on the hysterical if not out-right insane and nearly drives this book's readers (or me, at least) insane right along with him. Not to mention that it nearly breaks the taut string suspending the reader's disbelief because honestly, what teenage even speaks let alone THINKS like this? But after reaching the second act, it's quite clear that this obsessiveness is what has isolated him from his peers and why he searches to be so completely understood by someone like Oliver, who speaks his same coded language of gestures and unspoken words - even though they're often not on the same wave length. Elio's fevered imaginings also make him an almost delightfully unreliable narrator, where something he narrates early on as fact (e.g. the cold, death-glares he'd receive from Oliver) turn out to be misguided by his prejudices and not true at all. It lends a tender, nostalgic quality to the whole thing (which is already close to bursting with nostalgia), knowing that all the events are not as they were but merely as he remembers them. I came to realize that the story was painful to read because it was a painfully exact replica of what it is to be a teenager, and not because it was poorly written or ill-conceived. It intentionally takes its readers back to a time when your insides were on your outsides, all your feelings exposed, leaving you raw and vulnerable, so that every glance, every snide remark, especially from the person you're infatuated with, is like hot knives on your bare flesh. The reason I was so infuriated with Elio was because I was infuriated with myself, when I was a teenager, and felt and behaved the exact same way. Elio, despite his staggering intellect for a seventeen-year-old, is a profound idiot just like I was a profound idiot. The meat of the story is the romance between our leads, slow and painful in its engineering (like a roller-coaster going up), terrifying, rocketing, elating, wonderful when it's happening (the roller-coaster plummeting), that leaves you aching, dizzy, and nauseous in its denouement (the end of the ride). You spend so much time worshiping Oliver through Elio's eyes that when he turns out to be the coward, you refuse to believe it, until you're dragged unwillingly to the book's end a...

Spoilery "Twenty years was yesterday, and yesterday was just earlier this morning, and morning seemed light years away." Call Me By Your Name is a superlative novel that meticulously and comprehensively looks at the human condition from the folly of youth to the introspective later years. Told almost entirely from the stream of consciousness mind of a seventeen year old Elio, who simultaneously possesses intelligence beyond his years whilst embodying the insouciance of youth and trafficking in the same inane fickleness of the average teen in matters of the heart, and in him Aciman’s crafted a character that is quintessentially relatable. I was immediately transported back to my own teenage years. I remember being that person, though Elio is leaps and bounds more intelligent at seventeen than I could ever hope to be then or now. The profundity of his insights are staggering and keenly observant. But the games are the same, the angst the same, the intensity the same and, most importantly, the devotion the same. "There is a law somewhere that says that when one person is thoroughly smitten with the other, the other must unavoidably be smitten as well. […] Love, which exempts no one who’s loved from loving, Francesca’s words in the Inferno. Just wait and be hopeful. I was hopeful, though perhaps this was what I had wanted all along. To wait forever." First loves are oftentimes the hardest to let go of; they leave an indelible mark. For Elio, Oliver is that person. Oliver, the doctoral student who came to stay with him and his parents one summer in Italy, left a watermark on Elio’s soul. Six unforgettable weeks and an intimacy forged that some have no hope of ever attaining. They lived. They loved. They became a part of each other. People talk about the “simplicity” of youth but to my mind it was never simple. Elio has never been in love before and when you don’t know a thing it’s hard to know what to do with it, how to care for it, how to keep it. At seventeen he can’t possibly understand the rarity of his connection with Oliver, so he tells himself there will be another and there are, that it was never intended to last and maybe it wasn't, that is was a summer fling, but who's to say that makes it any less seminal? That’s what Aciman has done so masterfully with this novel; is it or isn’t it? Aciman has crafted his own Mona Lisa with Elio. "All that remains is dreammaking and strange remembrance." Life goes on, people drift in and out of our lives; some leave a lasting impression while others are evanescent. Oliver left a space to be certain, but Elio left one too and maybe those spaces are capricious depending on time and space. "-how we move through time, how time moves through us, how we change and keep changing and come back to the same." The ebbs and flows of life transm...

if you somehow haven’t heard of this book or at least the movie please read it. it captures summer romance in the most beautiful way i’ve read in a long time. it’s addicting and i don’t want to stop reading it. and it has changed my life