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| Call Me by Your Name: A Novel | 
 enlarge | Author: Andre Aciman
Publisher: Picador
Category: Book
List Price: $14.00
Buy Used: $6.95
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New (39) Used (23) Collectible (2) from $6.95
Avg. Customer Rating:  101 reviews
Sales Rank: 12178
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 256
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.5
Dimensions (in): 8.2 x 5.4 x 0.9
ISBN: 031242678X
Dewey Decimal Number: 813
EAN: 9780312426781
ASIN: 031242678X
Publication Date: January 22, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: Ex-library paperback - usual markings. Binding intact, pages clean and bright.
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Product Description
A New York Times Notable Book of the Year A Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year A Washington Post Best Fiction Book of the Year A New York Magazine “Future Canon” Selection A Chicago Tribune Favorite Book of the Year One of The Seattle Times’ Michael Upchurch’s Favorite Books of the Year An Amazon Top 100 Editors’ Picks of the Year An Amazon Top 10 Editors’ pick: Debut Fiction (#6) An Amazon Top 10 Editors’ pick: Gay & Lesbian (#1) Call Me by Your Name is the story of a sudden and powerful romance that blossoms between an adolescent boy and a summer guest at his parents' cliffside mansion on the Italian Riviera. During the restless summer weeks, unrelenting but buried currents of obsession, fascination, and desire intensify their passion as they test the charged ground between them and verge toward the one thing both already fear they may never truly find again: total intimacy. Andre Aciman's critically acclaimed debut novel is a frank, unsentimental, heartrending elegy to human passion.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 96 more reviews...
 Reflections on a Summer of Love February 6, 2008
299 out of 304 found this review helpful
CALL ME BY YOUR NAME is one of those books so rich in story, in content, and in style of writing that it immediately becomes one of the great novels of the time. With this novel Andre Aciman steps into the rarefied air of writers such as Jamie O'Neill, Colm Toibin, Reinaldo Arenas, Constantine Cavafy, Edmund White, Michael Cunningham, and even EM Forster and Thomas Mann - a disparate group of luminaries, perhaps, but each with the ability to create an evocative, sensual love story beyond the limits of traditional tales. Though highly recommended by friends over the past year, this reader only now had the pleasure of reading this novel, and the result was to immediately read it again, so rich are the treasures this book holds.
Agreeing with other reviewers that telling too much of the plot is unfair to those who have yet to read Aciman's book, suffice it to say that CALL ME BY YOUR NAME is a meditation on the awakening of love, the myriad emotional and physical responses of the act of attraction developing into acting out and becoming an obsession, and the indelible mark that 'first love' makes on the hearts and lives of those involved.
Elio is a beautiful seventeen-year old lad, transcribing Haydn's 'The Seven Last Words of Christ' in his Mediterranean villa where his parents annually invite a young writer for a six-week residency to complete a work and assist the father in his own work. This summer the resident scholar is twenty-four-year old American scholar Oliver who is having his work on Heraclitus translated into Italian. There is an attraction between the two young men, a veiled dance of courtship, and an ultimate revelation of a profound love that becomes intensely physical as it develops from its intellectual and artistic beginnings. The 'love affair', as erotic as any in literature, is fully realized on a brief trip to Rome, and then the two part: Elio remains in Italy and Oliver returns to the US. And after the summer's transforming events Elio narrates the next twenty years, sharing the impact of his first experience with love with the reader. The title of the book echoes the words the lovers' exchange during intimacy: each becomes the other and in doing so completely acknowledges himself.
Aciman writes so eloquently, so sensually, and so intelligently that many passages beg re-reading as soon as the impact of a paragraph is complete. Quoting from the book is almost impossible: where would you start to isolate excerpts in a work that has no weak pages? Yes, this is a gay love story, but it is far more than that. This is a meditation on the miracle of the transformations love induces, and those transformations are universal. A book of such quality should find a wide audience: Andre Aciman is writer of rare genius. Highly recommended. Grady Harp, February 08
The Beauty of Language, The Landscape of Mind January 28, 2007
150 out of 164 found this review helpful
Aciman, Andre, "Call Me By Your Name". Farrar, Strauss and Giroux. 2007
The Beauty of Language,The Landscape of Mind
Having just closed the covers of Andre Aciman's "Call Me By Your Name", I feel compelled to sit down and write what is going on in my mind. I am an avid reader and I have come across many books in my life yet the experience I had in reading Aciman's book is like one seldom found in the printed word. The book is pure beauty. Aciman has managed to tackle all of the emotions and put them down in beautiful prose. As you read you feel as if you have been hit over the head and literally dragged into the pages of the novel. You will experience feelings that you had no idea you were capable of and you will look back at your own life and begin to view it as you have never done before.
I am in awe of the novel and the novelist. It is not often that a single book can awaken these emotions in me and I am so glad that I found one book that made me sit up and realize so much--about the world and about myself.
The theme of adolescent love has become a staple in the world of literature and unfortunately more often than not it becomes a tired subject. Aciman has taken the theme and breathed fresh life into it. Here we have a story of love and regret that once read will not be quickly forgotten.
The book is about a romance that blooms quite suddenly between an adolescent boy and a summer guest at the youth's parent's summer home on the Italian seaside. Neither is prepared what might happen as a result of mutual attraction so they each pretend to be indifferent to the other. As might be expected, as the days pass during that beautiful summer, passion is unbridled and they test their feelings for each other. In doing so obsession and fear as well as fascination and desire burst forth allowing hidden feelings to surface, sometimes quite erotically. They find themselves involved in a deep and meaningful romantic encounter which barely lasts six weeks but eaves an indelible mark on both of them, a mark they will carry with them for the rest of their lives. What they discover in their feelings for each other is a total intimacy that happens maybe once in a lifetime.
Aciman captures beautifully the psychological maneuverings of the boy and the man as he writes his lament about human passion. When the love of their dreams explodes into the reality of closeness, we get a sentence that reads, "I did not know where all this was leading, but I was surrendering to him, inch by inch, and he must have known it, for I sensed he still keeping a distance between us." This sense of love to come pervades the novel and when that love does come it is inclusive, it is beautiful and it is highly sensual.
Before that love shows its face there are games played--footsie at dinner, stares of lust and steel, long runs, mind games. Seventeen year old Elio, an Italian youth and Oliver, an American graduate student play the game of cat and mouse with ambiguity, hostility and, above all, attraction. We, the readers, see the story from inside Elio's mind and thoughts where everything has meaning.
What about the sex? Believe me, it is there and there is plenty of it. There are also elaborate erotic fantasies and what makes all of this so interesting is that Andre Aciman is a straight man writing about gay sex. What Aciman set out to do in his novel was to show us human intimacy in all its preciousness and in all of its idiosyncrasies. The beauty of the language and the descriptions make you want to hop into the pages and be there with the characters--not as a fly on the wall, but as an active participant. It would be a chance to see what true intimacy is all about.
Desire has always been a cornerstone of life but I can tell you the desire that you read about in the pages of this book is unlike any other you have had the experience to read about or even to know. The pain of love is hard to depict in words yet "Call Me By Your Name" is an achingly painful and beautiful tribute to desire and intimacy and one you will not likely walk away from and forget.
I have recommended many books and I will continue to do so but this book is so dear, so tender, so brutal and so beautiful that I say this to you--if you read no other book this year, read this one.
An Impressive Debut Novel from Andre Aciman December 31, 2007
97 out of 100 found this review helpful
Andre Aciman, a noted essayist and City University of New York professor of comparative literature, has written one of the most memorable debut novels published this year, "Call Me by Your Name", ranking alongside Eugene Drucker's "The Savior" for its emotional intensity, as well as its high literary quality. It's a truly memorable coming-of-age story about an adolescent Italian Jewish man, Elio, who learns a lot about love and total intimacy from a visiting American professor, Oliver, during a brief six week period one summer, set, sometime, in Italy, back in the 1970s or 1980s. Aciman offers us an honest, unflinching portrait of total intimacy, showing how these two men gradually move from mere friendship to an all too brief, but intense, romantic encounter, in a small town on the Italian Riviera, and then later, one night, in Rome, shortly before Oliver flies back home. It is an encounter that will truly haunt both men for the rest of their lives, as depicted in occasional scenes that jump forward to the present day. Aciman's portrait is truly compelling, and one that I found impossible to put down (No wonder why it has been considered for prominent literary awards, such as the American Academy of Arts and Letters' Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction.); Aciman is not only a fine literary stylist, but a compelling storyteller too. Without question, his fine novel deserves ample consideration, not only from those familiar with his excellent nonfiction prose, but also from others, such as yours truly, who are not fully acquainted with his work.
"You Are My Homecoming" February 16, 2007
58 out of 63 found this review helpful
Andre Aciman says more about love, passion, desire, sorrow and loss in only 248 pages in CALL ME BY YOUR NAME-- the story lives up to everything the beautiful title suggests-- than seems humanly possible. Elio, a precocious seventeen-year-old, falls hopeless, totally for Oliver, a twenty-four-year old from Columbia University who comes to stay with Elio's family for six weeks in an idyllic Italian sun-drenched summer. We see the events as they unfold through the eyes of the narrator Elio who is beautiful, bright, sexy and full of reckless abandon as only the very young can be. His and Oliver's story is universal and as old as civilization itself. None of us will ever forgot our first lover when his absence was unbearable but his presence was frightening and all-consuming.
It is impossible to do justice to this book as it is almost an extended poem. Like all poetry, it can survive dissection, but the least said about it, the better. A word to the reader, however: Beware. You will care desperately about these two men as well as other well-drawn characaters, particularly Elio's father, who is so gentle, so kind, so intuitive, such a wise parent and the tragic Vimini, who is ten years old at the beginning of the novel that covers a span of twenty years.
Mr. Aciman's beautiful prose is both poetic and profound: Words get turned around, turned in on themselves, used again in a different setting or context. Elio's quotation of Shelley's friends words, "heart of hearts," as he seized the dead poet's heart out of his body as he was being cremated, turns up again near the end of the novel as an inscription on a post card that Oliver ["'I've never said anything truer in my life to anyone'"] hopes his son will one day bring to Elio. Elio on Oliver: "You are my homecoming." "I look back on those days and regret none of it, not the risks, not the shame, nor the total lack of foresight." Finally his words to Oliver near the end of the novel: "'You are the only person I'd like to say goodbye to when I die, because only then will this thing I call my life make any sense. And if I should hear that you died, my life as I know it, the me who is speaking with you now, will cease to exist.'"
Mr. Aciman's descriptions of these two men's lovemaking is as torrid as the Italian sun; what these men do with a ripe peach is as erotic as anything D. H. Lawrence every wrote. Like all great literature, this novel will remind you of other fine fiction: for example, James Joyce's long short story about tragic lost young love, "The Dead," as well as Annie Proulx's more recent and much praised "Brokeback Mountain."
CALL ME BY YOUR NAME is one of the rarest of novels. You are at once so caught up in its drama that you race through it but hope it will never end since you fear that these two characters whom you care about so deeply will not grow old together.
Novels like this one never go out of style.
Buon Giorno, Tristesse February 26, 2007
56 out of 60 found this review helpful
I read this extraordinary novel after seeing several good reviews, notably the one in the NY Times. It is a story of first love involving two men, but it can't really be classified as specialty literature. Here is a funny, harrowing, heartbreaking coming-of-age tale that everyone will instantly recognize.
A 17-year-old Italian boy discovers the joy and anguish of adult emotions one summer on the Italian Riviera. The lyrical prose, frank sexuality, and clear-eyed tone of the novel remind me of another instant classic, Francoise Sagan's BONJOUR TRISTESSE. I recently reread that personal favorite, and I had it in mind as I read this. Like Sagan, Aciman places us inside the mind of an uncannily precocious teenager, showing us everything through his eyes. His total fixation on the object of his passion--an older American post-grad scholar who's visiting for the summer--is overwhelming, and some of the scenes between the two are so intimate that reading them actually feels like an intrusion. But Aciman insists on telling the truth of every single moment of the affair, and his young hero has an unblinking gaze.
The rocky road to adulthood never changes--but every now and then we get a voice like this to tell us the story. I recommend CALL ME BY YOUR NAME to everyone who was ever 17.
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