Call Me by Your Name

I feel like I’ve been waiting for a very long time to read Call Me By Your Name. While everyone else around me was watching the movie and discussing its contents, I was adding it to my to-be-read list. I’m the type of person that has that annoying habit of always wanting to read the book first. But it kept ending up on the back burner, pushed off by other books. 

But, in my attempt to read as many of the queer books on my tbr as possible for pride month, I finally said ‘why not?’ and got the ebook.

I should not have gone into it so carelessly. 

I did not know what I was getting myself into.

I was shocked to find that the writing style, rather than reminding me of 2007 when it was written, was reminiscent of 1800s classic literature. Even town names are shortened to their first initial, similarly to the way authors of that time would anonymize places. The narration is formal, introspective, and lyrical. It creates beauty wherever it can and thinks on things for pages and pages. 

This is not exactly a bad thing but was somewhat jarring to one who did not expect it. The story is not set in that period, after all, and is told from the perspective of a modern man, the main character Elio, looking back on his life as a teenager one summer in Italy. The summer he met and fell in love with Oliver, an older man and professor, visiting from America for a few short months.

Nevertheless, the writing style creates and carries a certain tone throughout the novel, which is a little strange and in contrast to the age of the characters and the time, and harder to get into than other writing, but not altogether off-putting. 

“We are not written for one instrument alone; I am not, neither are you.”

Unlike classic literature, however, we are thrust straight into the story, which is given to us in often out-of-order memories connected by certain feelings and events, sometimes giving us reality and sometimes dreams, so that it can be confusing to remember which is which. Where stories like Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre would bide their time until the moments of chaste romance, creating tension with other drama, (usually regarding familial relations and the issue of money) the only conflict in Call Me by Your Name is when Oliver and Elio will get together and what will happen when Oliver goes back to the states. It’s not even a matter of if they will get together. Even without the synopsis, you would know within the first chapter that they end up together. Perhaps even the first page. 

This lack of conflict creates somewhat of a dull storyline, spiced up only by the romantic scenes which, as is well known by this point thanks in large part to the film, are anything but chaste. The driving force of the story is only to see what Elio and Oliver will say to each other, do to each other, and how long it will take them for it to happen. Which, is not much to keep a story going. 

 “I’d stake my entire life on dreams and be done with the rest.”

The other characters mean next to nothing and are given little time to be seen or regarded. When they get any amount of space on the page, we find only that they are quite absurd, although each in their own way. A young girl who talks like she is an experienced older woman, an eccentric poet, parents who don’t give a damn about anything their son does (smiling at the thought of him sleeping around), and so on. 

But then again, Oliver and Elio barely get any characterization either. We know them only as they are in this one summer, tangled up with each other so that we know them only after. After they have met, after Elio becomes obsessed. We never get a real sense of who Elio was before Oliver. We don’t even get the moment in which he falls for him. We only get when he has fallen. Meanwhile, we only get a sense of Oliver through Elio’s narrative, which of course is a completely biased opinion, and anyways, knows little about who Oliver was outside of the one summer. Both remain somewhat mysterious, despite being the central figures of the book, and the fact that we get to know them in other ways so intimately.

Because of all this, I found it extremely difficult to connect to the story or the characters. 

The writing style is distancing in tone, but also in the physical perspective, looking back on the summer from an older version-of-Elio’s view. I felt as if I only got to know one extremely focused (obsessed) side of the main characters and nothing at all of everyone else. And because of this, and because I didn’t really see how Elio fell for Oliver, I struggled to care about their love. 

That being said, I think that all of these factors work together to achieve what the novel is trying to do. After all, Call Me By Your Name is a story about a love which at once is so beautiful and yet so harmful. The all-consuming nature of the feelings they have for each other is depicted very well in the way the narrative is so focused, and the way they are barely anything at all without each other.

What I’m trying to say is that…I get it. It makes sense. I understand why all these decisions were made. 

And usually, I would try to put my personal enjoyment of a book aside in order to highlight its weaknesses and strengths. It’s the way I use my writing degree and all the hours of college classes I spent practicing critiquing literature, which is otherwise somewhat going to waste. 

But I just can’t help it with this book. 

Because it is so personal. I think that someone’s enjoyment of this book may rest almost solely on whether they can connect to Elio, or more specifically, to the love he has for Oliver. And the best way to have that happen is if the reader has experienced such love, such an obsession, themselves. If someone has not had this experience or is not yet in a position where they can look at their similar situation with any fondness than I think it will be very difficult to like this book. 

“People who read are hiders. They hide who they are. People who hide don’t always like who they are.”

Aside from all the ways that this novel attempts to convey this sort of feeling, there was also one small thing that peeved me and may also irk other readers, especially those who are picking it up more recently. The idea that cheating is not cheating if it is done with someone who is a different gender than their main partner or love interest was something that was repeated in this story several times. Meaning, if a man that was in love with a man slept with a woman, he saw this as a completely separate and unimportant occurrence that meant nothing to the relationship with the man, even if they were committed to one another. I thought at first that this was just Elio’s view, and cringed at it, but excused it as part of his flawed character, until it came up again with other characters who seemed to think it just as obvious. It put a bad taste in my mouth whenever it arose. I’d warn those who hate to see cheating in books that it’s certainly in this story and excused. 

“Time makes us sentimental. Perhaps, in the end, it is because of time that we suffer.”

I rated Call Me By Your Name 3.5 out of 5 stars. I acknowledge what it was trying to do, but couldn’t get into it and believe that there are plenty of others who will experience this distancing effect too. But, I would recommend this book to anyone who is into classics but just wishes there was something kinkier with a male-male romance to read too.