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A review by batrock
Call Me by Your Name by André Aciman
2.0
This is what we call a bad book.
Rather than being a conventional review, this one should begin with a couple of choice quotes.
At the time, this was terrible; now, two days later, "apricock" appears to have entered my vocabulary. It's not literature.
This one is just disgusting. I'll spare you the semantics of the passage in which the protagonist copulates with a peach and then feeds it to his love interest, as long as you know that it happens between the pages of this book. And it's not even supposed to be some sort of weird gay fetish depository, but rather the distillation of six weeks in one teenager's life.
Unfortunately, Aciman is not only slightly perverted (and, by extension, a caster of aspersions on the proclivities of homosexuals the world over), but he also believes that six weeks in the summer of one's seventeenth year can irrevocably ruin your life. While this is true of some events, and the six weeks are undeniably formative, the experiences of Elio are the sort of thing that you're supposed to learn and grow from, not the sort that you're supposed to wallow in well past your fortieth birthday.
One gets the impression that Call Me By Your Name was written solely for the sake of the final paragraph, but there are 248 pages to wade through to get there and the "lesson" that we come away with is more frustrating than it is meaningful.
So what is this novel about? Call Me By Your Name describes an Italian summer in the mid eighties, where a seventeen year old boy decides to finally sort of confront his homosexual desire when he meets the summer lodger, 24 year old American philosophy student Oliver. The relationship that they forge is initially devoted to wasting time (as denoted by the "apricock" sequence), and then it crescendoes into the unorthodoxies that Aciman believes constitute closeness and devotion (peaches and mutual toilet use). Cut to the epilogue which shows that Elio has learned nothing, and that the reader cannot possibly glean what he has done with the intervening time.
Most of this is laid out from the first pages: this book is never going to end romantically sound for its lead. However, one should not subscribe to the idea that you only ever get one chance to fall in love, because if you fall in love at 17 for six weeks, what are you going to do with the rest of your life? Hang around and mope?
An argument can and has been made for reading this through the Proustian prism, taking it as an example of the power of memory to transform us. I've not read Proust and it's probably an insult to him to suggest that Aciman is one of his bedfellows. This is less a piece of literature than it is an essay on fetishism and the ability of the human spirit to repeatedly crush itself.
Aciman takes every opportunity to alienate his audience with this tale of the idle rich and their imaginary problems; there is very little here for anybody.
Rather than being a conventional review, this one should begin with a couple of choice quotes.
It would never have occurred to him that in placing the apricot in my palm he was giving me his ass to hold or that, in biting the fruit, I was also biting into that part of his body that must have been fairer than the rest because it never apricates - and near it, if I dared to bite that far, his apricock.
At the time, this was terrible; now, two days later, "apricock" appears to have entered my vocabulary. It's not literature.
We had never taken a shower together. We had never even been in the same bathroom together. "Don't flush," I'd said, "I want to look." What I saw brought out strains of compassion, for him, for his body, for his life, which suddenly seemed so frail and vulnerable. "Our bodies won't have secrets now," I said as I took my turn and sat down. He had hopped into the bathtub and was just about to turn on the shower. "I want you to see mine," I said. He did more. He stepped out, kissed me on the mouth, and, pressing and massaging my tummy with the flat of his hand, watched the whole thing happen.
This one is just disgusting. I'll spare you the semantics of the passage in which the protagonist copulates with a peach and then feeds it to his love interest, as long as you know that it happens between the pages of this book. And it's not even supposed to be some sort of weird gay fetish depository, but rather the distillation of six weeks in one teenager's life.
Unfortunately, Aciman is not only slightly perverted (and, by extension, a caster of aspersions on the proclivities of homosexuals the world over), but he also believes that six weeks in the summer of one's seventeenth year can irrevocably ruin your life. While this is true of some events, and the six weeks are undeniably formative, the experiences of Elio are the sort of thing that you're supposed to learn and grow from, not the sort that you're supposed to wallow in well past your fortieth birthday.
One gets the impression that Call Me By Your Name was written solely for the sake of the final paragraph, but there are 248 pages to wade through to get there and the "lesson" that we come away with is more frustrating than it is meaningful.
So what is this novel about? Call Me By Your Name describes an Italian summer in the mid eighties, where a seventeen year old boy decides to finally sort of confront his homosexual desire when he meets the summer lodger, 24 year old American philosophy student Oliver. The relationship that they forge is initially devoted to wasting time (as denoted by the "apricock" sequence), and then it crescendoes into the unorthodoxies that Aciman believes constitute closeness and devotion (peaches and mutual toilet use). Cut to the epilogue which shows that Elio has learned nothing, and that the reader cannot possibly glean what he has done with the intervening time.
Most of this is laid out from the first pages: this book is never going to end romantically sound for its lead. However, one should not subscribe to the idea that you only ever get one chance to fall in love, because if you fall in love at 17 for six weeks, what are you going to do with the rest of your life? Hang around and mope?
An argument can and has been made for reading this through the Proustian prism, taking it as an example of the power of memory to transform us. I've not read Proust and it's probably an insult to him to suggest that Aciman is one of his bedfellows. This is less a piece of literature than it is an essay on fetishism and the ability of the human spirit to repeatedly crush itself.
Aciman takes every opportunity to alienate his audience with this tale of the idle rich and their imaginary problems; there is very little here for anybody.