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A review by bethaniekay
Call Me by Your Name by André Aciman
2.0
I cannot believe so many people are gushing over this book. The only reason I read it so quickly is because I wanted to see if something good would ever, finally, happen. Or how things would finally resolve themselves. And I skimmed most of the fluff, because there was a lot of it.
This book is all inner-thoughts, mind games, second-guessing, and disastrous run-on sentences that go nowhere and make you wonder what the hell you just read. Sorry, that's not "beautiful writing". There are pages upon pages of introspection, yet very little dialogue and even less action.
I will give some credit to the beautiful setting - except, oh wait, we don't even know where the hell they actually were supposed to be. Why oh WHY would you bother abbreviating the names of the towns as just single letters? Who are we hiding from? It's not like this is a non-fiction and we need to protect the innocent, or that we were reading someone's diary who abbreviated the town for brevity's sake. If I'm going to be reading about a villa somewhere in Italy, I want to know WHERE it is, even if it's using a false name - give me some landmarks to orient the place in my imagination.
I will also give some credit to the angst and desire that goes along with teenage obsession and lust. I thought some of the thoughts and feelings were accurate, and the fact that it was a same-sex relationship didn't bother me a bit. I was slightly creeped-out by the peach scene (which was just weird), and SUPER creeped-out by the toilet scene in Rome. That was just weird and left a bad taste in my mouth, as IMO that's the wrong kind of intimacy to have. Or, at least to write about. Ugh.
In the end, though, it's absolutely ridiculous to assert that a mere few weeks when Elio was 17 years old had such a profound impact on his life -- that more than 20 years later, he was still so impacted by his time with Oliver that his life had pretty much been crippled. We are really given no information about how Elio's life has gone, or what he has done, only the notion that he's been sad and unsatisfied and has continued to question everything about Oliver his whole life. Come ON. Yes, things that happen in our teenage years impact us, but not THAT bad. We learn and we move on.
It'll be interesting to see how this is adapted into a movie -- but in terms of the book, I would never recommend this to anyone.
This book is all inner-thoughts, mind games, second-guessing, and disastrous run-on sentences that go nowhere and make you wonder what the hell you just read. Sorry, that's not "beautiful writing". There are pages upon pages of introspection, yet very little dialogue and even less action.
I will give some credit to the beautiful setting - except, oh wait, we don't even know where the hell they actually were supposed to be. Why oh WHY would you bother abbreviating the names of the towns as just single letters? Who are we hiding from? It's not like this is a non-fiction and we need to protect the innocent, or that we were reading someone's diary who abbreviated the town for brevity's sake. If I'm going to be reading about a villa somewhere in Italy, I want to know WHERE it is, even if it's using a false name - give me some landmarks to orient the place in my imagination.
I will also give some credit to the angst and desire that goes along with teenage obsession and lust. I thought some of the thoughts and feelings were accurate, and the fact that it was a same-sex relationship didn't bother me a bit. I was slightly creeped-out by the peach scene (which was just weird), and SUPER creeped-out by the toilet scene in Rome. That was just weird and left a bad taste in my mouth, as IMO that's the wrong kind of intimacy to have. Or, at least to write about. Ugh.
In the end, though, it's absolutely ridiculous to assert that a mere few weeks when Elio was 17 years old had such a profound impact on his life -- that more than 20 years later, he was still so impacted by his time with Oliver that his life had pretty much been crippled. We are really given no information about how Elio's life has gone, or what he has done, only the notion that he's been sad and unsatisfied and has continued to question everything about Oliver his whole life. Come ON. Yes, things that happen in our teenage years impact us, but not THAT bad. We learn and we move on.
It'll be interesting to see how this is adapted into a movie -- but in terms of the book, I would never recommend this to anyone.