Andre Aciman, the author of “Out of Egypt” and a professor at the Graduate School and University Center of the City University of New York, published his first novel in 2007. “Call Me by Your Name” successfully mimics the tone of Aciman’s academic subject, Proust. The novel is split into four parts (rather than two, as in Proust’s “Swann’s Way”), as the movement of the novel’s principal characters follows the familiar path: love’s development, its eventual consummation, and the loss that occurs in its wake, before revisiting the novel’s principal characters years later.
Aciman grew up multilingual in Alexandria, Egypt, a Turkish expatriate whose uncle was close friends with the king. His Sephradic family left Egypt upon his father’s loss of a wool mill in 1964. They resettled in Italy, followed by New York City. “Out of Egypt,” Aciman’s first book and a foray into the memoir, details his childhood: luxurious memories of sun, food, and leisure punctuated by emotionally -resonant depictions of his family. Following the book’s release and positive reception, Aciman wrote for periodicals and anthologized a collection of his own writing, as well as a collection of essays concerning “In Search of Lost Time.” “Call Me by Your Name” repeats much of the language and detail of his personal narratives and therefore achieves a level of intimacy that few novels do.
Oliver meets Elio in his twenty-fourth summer. Elio’s father, a professor, has agreed to house Oliver for the summer while he researches a classics dissertation. The costal Italian villa life he happens upon opens up his academic and erotic desires. Every object he possesses seduces Elio, whose immersion in the world of professors, writers, and artists has given him a fluency in the languages of music, poetry, and history that far exceeds his years. Aciman begins their flirtation by treating Oliver’s skin as text, “It told me things about him I never knew to ask.” The younger gains knowledge from the older, and the full-bodied, albeit lengthy, sentences that punctuate the beginning of the novel reflect its burgeoning sense of passion.
The book is drenched in allusion and sun. At one point, Elio and Oliver sit on a cliff near the water looking down upon the place where the famous poet Percy Bysshe Shelley was said to have drowned. A contentious figure during his time, Shelley has since been canonized as one of the greatest poets of the nineteenth century. His project—perfectly aligned with the sense of boyhood whose evaporation “Call Me by Your Name” depicts—was to use his poetry as a mouthpiece against tyranny’s wicked grasp. Although he was technically inventive, his poems suffered from excessive lyricism and repetitious diction, and Aciman’s account of the relationship between these two men cannot help but suffer from Shelley’s romantic influence. However, it lacks the earnest pleas of Shelley; it is hard-worn by the implacable certainty of loss that comes with age.
Despite the interplay of dependence and freedom, all of the bedside chatter in “Call Me by Your Name” arrives at nothing. The plot hinges upon a small series of events in which bookstores, monuments of Dante, and craggy, saltwater-drenched rocks construct nearly allegorical scenes. Despite the unintentional deception that comes with first love, Elio eventually escapes to a successful future while Oliver finds himself bound to convention. Like the pages of Proust, Aciman’s novel is cluttered with memory instead of action. It’s as if Elio’s use of a peach (rather than Proust’s madeleine) leads him to reconsider the world and the individual’s place in it. In this case, a primarily erotic transformation occurs. Oliver cannot bring himself to run from this intensity, something he has yet to feel. Unfortunately, love can only shape individuals so many times. A sense of vitality bleeds from these pages because the characters are so romantically couched in their situation, their love affair pictured as a labyrinth with a trembling conclusion.
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