Call Me By Your Name by André Aciman
I guess a lot of you have read this book already or seen the movie (which I have not). This is essentially a coming-of-age story, where a seventeen-year-old boy falls in love with a man in his early twenties. The age gap here is seven years, for anyone who needs to know these things before starting a book.
The book is set in Italy in the eighties and has all the summer/beach vibes you could ever want.
Despite the fact that this is not an easy love story, I hesitate to call it a romance. Elio is the wisest seventeen-year-old and, at the same time, the most childishly cruel. And as the whole book is written from his perspective, we get to see all his blunders and all the weirdness of his mind up close. And I don’t even mean the peach thing (if you read this book, you know). I mean how he treats the people in his life, especially the women/girls around him.
Choices were made in this book that I find icky—again, none of the sex or the relationship between Elio and Oliver fall in this category, but there is this scene where a poet is talking about Thailand and the people there and how all the boys look like boys and boys like girls and…IDK. Something about the scene doesn’t sit right with me.
This is also a somewhat academic novel/love story. A lot of rich boy with a good education that read the classics vibes here as well. Which could explain Elio’s overall aloofness, as he’s been fed this stuff at a young age.
Call Me by Your Name is an interesting book, and I enjoyed reading it. Would I recommend it to someone who is looking for a summer romance? No. But I would recommend it to someone who likes his boys a bit weird.
I got Find Me too, but haven’t read it yet.
