LGBT Literature is a Readers and Book Lovers series dedicated to discussing literature that has made an impact on the lives of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people. From fiction to contemporary nonfiction to history and everything in between, any literature that touches on LGBT themes is welcome in this series. LGBT Literature posts on the last Sunday of every month at 7:30 PM EST. If you are interested in writing for the series, please send a kosmail to Chrislove.
“In the weeks we’d been thrown together that summer, our lives had scarcely touched, but we had crossed to the other bank, where time stops and heaven reaches down to earth and gives us that ration of what is from birth divinely ours. We looked the other way. We spoke about everything but. But we’ve always known, and not saying anything now it confirmed it all the more. We found the stars, you and I. And this is given only once.”
The last sentence of André Aciman's Call Me By Your Name (Picador/Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2007) suggests the overriding theme, which, for me, means that no matter those loved before or after, there will always be one who touched the farthest reaches of the heart, the one we call by our own name because of what we have traded, what we have given, what we have given up.
It is the summer season and precocious Elio, seventeen, resides in a small, sea-side Italian town where Shelley might have drowned and Monet might have painted. The teenager resides with his mother and professor father who have opened their home for the past several summers to promising academics, artists, and musicians who are pursuing special projects. The father, especially, enjoys the dinner time which often resembles a French salon, with spirited discussions and the cadence of several languages piercing the atmosphere. For the adolescent son, it is often drudgery, even though he can hold his own on a number of topics. The latest guest who will partake is twenty-four year-old Oliver, a student and teacher at Columbia University in New York. He needs to finish, and have translated into Italian, a book on Heraclitus.
Oh yes, Elio and Oliver fall in love. Their story is told through the thoughts of Elio and his dialogue with Oliver and an interesting array of characters of many ages and class. Elio, knowledgeable about so many subjects beyond his years, is flummoxed by his sudden obsession with Oliver. The developing relationship becomes a subtle cat and mouse story with delicious role playing and reversals, with Oliver, older and wiser, trying awfully hard to hide his attraction (after all he is a guest in Pro’s {Oliver’s nickname for Professor Perlman} home), and Oliver really doesn’t need (want?) such a distraction from his work. Aciman gets the mindset of a brilliant adolescent’s world just right. When Elio catches Oliver staring at him and returns the gaze, Elio is hurt by the sudden coldness in Oliver’s eyes. “After I finished my transcription, I became aware of the keenest glance coming from my left. It thrilled and flattered me; he was obviously interested—he liked me. It hadn’t been as difficult as all that then. But when taking my time, I finally turned to face him and take in his glance, I met a cold and icy glare—something at once hostile and vitrified that bordered on cruelty.”
Elio spends a great deal of time transcribing classical piano compositions in order to play them on his guitar. When Oliver asks Elio to repeat something he has just played, Oliver sounds frustrated when Elio changes the way he is playing the piece. “You changed it. It’s not the same. What did you do to it?” “I just played it the way Liszt played it had he jimmied around with it.” “Just play it again, please!” In the evening when Elio is writing in his diary about Oliver’s feigned exasperation, Elio adds a P.S.: We are not written for one instrument alone; I am not, neither are you.
At one point in the skittish relationship Oliver affectionately, in a buddy-to-buddy gesture, squeezes Elio’s shoulder in front of other people and Elio pretends that Oliver is hurting him in order to hide how much he wanted to turn and curl into Oliver’s body, to signal his complete submission to Oliver. Before the author allows that to happen, Aciman takes us through the two young men’s relationships with the supporting cast of characters. Both have intimate flings with young women during the early part of the summer, other instruments as it were. And neither Oliver nor Elio think the parents have knowledge of the burgeoning relationship. Of course they do, and even the maid/cook Malfalda treats Elio differently, throwing him looks that she understands what it means to be young and heartsick.
Aciman’s prose beguiles effortlessly, not an easy thing to accomplish when you are in the mind of a seventeen-year-old, but I think he gets it just right for this story of first love, and, in my opinion, one that avoids a mawkishness that could have slipped its way in. Call Me By Your Name is leavened by humor, and yet humbled by the tender, serious journey of Elio’s story. Apricots and peaches take on whole new meanings for Elio.
“Yours,” like “Later!” had an off-the-cuff, unceremonious “here, catch” quality that reminded me how twisted and secretive my desires were compared to the expansive spontaneity of everything about him. 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 that the rest because it never apricated—and near it, if I dared to bite that far, his apricock.”
The author’s skill at combining eroticism and humor is on full display when Elio uses a peach as a masturbation aid. After the ejaculation into the heart of the peach (an ass or a vagina, muses Elio) Oliver walks into the room and realizes what has just happened; he takes the peach off the desk, and in spite of Elio’s objections, eats. Do I dare to eat a peach? The author had already prepared the reader to think of Prufrock by slipping in a few unattributed lines from T.S. Eliot: “even if we cuddle up, you and I, when the night is spread across the sky. . .”
Elio’s recognition of a mutuality of kinship is what Call Me By Your Name stresses, because it is the road to wholeness. He not only must deal with the thrill of the ride, he must also face the guilt and feelings of shame. Integrating a new discovery about the self is never easy, even when it is based on joy and passion. Nothing is immediately replaced wholly. The newfound part of his being is bound to tussle with many of his conceptions about what it means to be in love, and to love someone of the same gender to boot, someone he might he have called a hateful name only a few years back.
“This not, cannot, had better not be a dream, because the words that came to me, as I pressed my eyes shut, were, this is like coming home after years away among the Trojans and Lestrygorians, like coming to a place where everyone is like you, where people know, they just know—coming home as when everything falls into place and you suddenly realize that for seventeen years all you’d been doing was fiddling with the wrong combination.”
After the on-again, off-again courtship, the first coupling takes place just a few weeks before Oliver is to return to the States. Aciman describes the first love-making through Elio’s eyes, of course, but it is Oliver who understands its importance.
“The dream had been right—this was like coming home, like asking, Where have you been all my life? Which is another way of asking, Where were you in my childhood, Oliver? Which was another way of asking, What is life without this? Which was why, in the end it was I, and not he, who blurted out, not once, but many times, You’ll kill me if you stop, you’ll kill me if you stop, because it was my way of bringing full circle the dream and the fantasy, me and him, the longed-for words from his mouth to my mouth and back into his mouth, swapping words from mouth to mouth, which was when I must have begun using obscenities that he repeated after me, softly at first till he said, Call me by your name and I’ll call you by mine, which I ‘d never done in my life before and which, as soon as I said my own name, as though it was his, took me to a realm I never shared with anyone in my life before, or since.”
The final three days before Oliver’s departure are spent in Rome, where Elio is introduced to some of Oliver’s friends and an intoxicating mix of artists and literati. Elio is charmed by the way in which the people in Rome seem so comfortable in exposing their desires in such a casual, playful way, so that one could partake or reject, I suppose, without a big fuss, without hurt feelings? Elio had been counting the days, preparing himself for the separation, and when he returns home, alone, realizes that he is going to be all right, sort of. When his Father asks him, “So, how was Rome?” Elio begins by listing sights, events, dinners, getting drunk and vomiting in front of a live version posing as a statue of Dante; but his Father presses further, finally addressing Elio’s friendship with Oliver.
“Look,” he interrupted, “You had a beautiful friendship. And I envy you. In my place, most parents would hope the whole thing goes away, or pray that their sons land on their feet soon enough. But I am not such a parent. In your place, if there is pain, nurse it, and if there is a flame, don’t snuff it out, don’t be brutal with it. We rip out so much of ourselves to be cured of things faster than we should that we go bankrupt by the age of thirty and have less to offer each time we start with someone new. But to feel nothing so as not to feel anything—what a waste!”
This summer romance and the two-week explicit affair follow Oliver and Elio as they create future lives in separate spaces. The question of reunion hangs over the last part of Call Me By Your Name and is answered, partly, by what is left unsaid, but known, by the two lovers when they meet fifteen years later. The ending left me a little unsettled, but in a good way, I think, and I can only hope that you, and all the GLBTQ youth out there, as you cross to another bank, where time stops, and heaven reaches down to earth, are given that ration of what is divinely yours.
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In an interview by Lynn Carey in the Marin Independent Journal (24th May 2008), Aciman states: “I don’t like to say if there is an Oliver in my life, that remains private business. But if your heart is in the right place when writing a book like this, it’s a good as having experienced it yourself. For it to be true it doesn’t have to have happened. You have to have thought it through, to take it to the end point. Call Me By Your Name came about because of a yearning to go back to Italy.” “Which of the characters am I? Am I Elio? Am I Oliver? Or the poet? Or the Father? I would be all of them, every single one of them . . .”
Wishing to know more about the author, I read his memoir, Out of Egypt (Picador/FSG, 1994), and will report on that alongside his latest novel, Enigma Variations (FSG, 2017), for future diaries. André Aciman is a Shepardi Jew born in Alexandria, Egypt, where he lived until his family was expelled in 1965. He is currently Distinguished Professor at the Graduate Center of City University in New York where he teaches literary theory and the works of Marcel Proust. Previously, he taught creative writing at New York University and French Literature at Princeton and Bard College. Aciman lives in Manhattan with his wife and is the father of three children.
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