YOU HAVE SELECTED:
Call Me By Your Name by Andre Aciman (2007)
“Twenty years was yesterday, and yesterday was just this morning, and this morning seemed like light years away.”
PRELIMINARY SIDE-NOTE: I came across this story first watching the movie. I decided to check it out after watching the 2018 Oscars ceremony online and wondering what all the fuss was about. Wow. This movie genuinely changed my life. I have sat through it with people just to see their reactions, recommended it to anyone I can. It is my favourite to date. The book is in my top 3 favourites. The best way to enjoy this book, even according to its author, is actually to watch the movie first. He says nothing could better portray what he envisaged when he was writing it. This is not supposed to be a film review but I must say: Timothee Chalamet, Armie Hammer, Michael Stuhlbarg, Sufjan Stevens, that setting, that camera filter, that script, the goosebumps. I’m a sucker for Italy, the 80’s and Timothee Chalamet so maybe I’m biased… but in all seriousness, I don’t know if I would love this book as much if I hadn’t seen the movie first. The two portrayals go hand in hand to create the full picture. Watch first. Read second. Watch again.
SYNOPSIS: I don’t really want to spoil anything about the book or the film here. So I will have to remain vague with the following synopsis. The book is set in Northern Italy, nowhere in-particular. Elio, is a seventeen year-old American and the character who’s experiences we, the reader, follow. Elio spends the summers here with his parents every year and he has made friends and found love interests in the town over the years. Each summer his father, an academic, also has a house guest to stay, an archaeology student to do research for 6 weeks with him and Elio is able to befriend these guests each year. The tone at the beginning of the book is that he is now of an age where he’s getting pretty tired of this routine, but this summer things turn out differently. Aciman has said he wrote this when he was young, dreaming he was Elio, and the tone that this is a dream lifts from the pages perfectly.
THOUGHTS: The entire tone of the book is passion, secrecy, shyness, insecurity, naivety and uncertainty in falling in love, in accepting yourself and your life and your choices. It is waiting. It is wondering. It is ripe fruit on summer trees. It is sitting up waiting for someone only to pretend you are asleep when they come home. This book encapsulates the freedom of youth, the freedom of feeling and acting without consequence. It embodies what it means to be human and to feel despair, anguish, longing, thrill, excitement, desire, passion and the effects a short period of time can have on the very fabric of a person’s being and the way this can impact an entire lifetime of thought. All-consuming, ever-lasting, ‘learn to put it to the back of your mind’, feeling. I have never felt a romance novel really portray the genuine emotions involved with falling in love more realistically than this one. It brings about any similar feeling you have felt. It draws you into it. You are there, sympathising with and cheering for Elio.
The acceptance of everything in the book and film is what really stood out to me. There is no drama, there is no crescendo, there is no antagonist who disagrees wholeheartedly with the way someone is acting. There is religion without argument, there is controversy without controversy. The characters allow one another to act and feel and hurt and fear and make the wrong decisions and they all accept that humans simply do this. The way mistakes are accepted as such makes it almost feel peaceful even in moments of strife that the characters face. An idyllic world in which no one is expected to be perfect and no one is punished for being otherwise. There is no fall out. Just a constant falling. The parents in this book are stand-out characters, and portrayed wonderfully in the movie also. You are given the impression that all they want is for Elio to genuinely become who he is, whoever that may be. They can offer guidance where required without interference. The father in particular wills Elio to feel everything he possibly can- he makes a stand-out speech which is transposed directly from the book into the movie script. There is wisdom and consolation passed on without control and more importantly, without judgement.
“When we least expect it, nature has cunning ways of finding our weakest spot”.
There are elements in the book which are not in the movie of greater intimacy, and an entire segment in which the future is shown. The ‘twenty years later’ we don’t get to see in cinemas. I don’t know if I’d rather not have read it, there was something about the melancholic, hanging and uncertain ending of the movie that I deeply enjoyed. We were left longing and wondering and making up our own endings. The book, on the other hand, shows us the ‘what ifs’ in fruition. This revealing segment of the book, I re-read immediately as soon as I’d finished it, just to make sure I had picked up on absolutely everything that ends up happening to the characters I had fallen completely in love with, on a bus somewhere in New Zealand where I had all the time in the world for reading.
I could not recommend this highly enough.
Places We Roam 