Call Me by Your Name

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Location: Osborne Village – Winnipeg, Manitoba
Book: Call me by your Name by Andre Aciman

It’s rare that I watch the movie version of a book before reading the book – but it’s happened three times I can remember. The first time was with Stardust, which is a better movie than a book, and the second was with The Reader, which is exceptional in both film and novel form. The third, of course, was with Call Me by Your Name.

If I’m honest, I was only vaguely aware that the film was an adaption of a book when Topher and I saw it. The movie was a runaway hit when it came out, it was impossible not to want to see it. And hard not to fall in love with it when you did. Call Me by Your Name is a visually staggering film. The scenes of a hazy, dreamy summer spent in rural Italy in the eighties recall the decade as a time of irreverent fun borne of boredom, which I suspect it was at times, but know it definitely wasn’t all the time. What fun we used to have being bored sometimes, it makes the viewer remember. But the cinematography is almost a distraction from the story, which is allowed to take centre stage in the novel of the same title by Andre Aciman.

It goes without saying that there are parts of Call My by Your Name that didn’t make it to the film. But as cinematic adaptations go, the movie is relatively true to both the spirit and the events of the book, which recounts a brief and torrid summer love affair between teenaged Elio and Oliver, an older student who comes to spend the summer studying under the direction of Elio’s father, a professor. And in that way, neither the film or the novel disappoint. If you enjoy one, it’s likely you’ll take pleasure in the other, too. But the novel, like all books, can spend more time on details. While we see Elio and Oliver’s love affair play out on film, we experience it in the book, living it with them from beginning to end.

“Twenty years was yesterday, and yesterday was just earlier this morning, and morning seemed light-years away.”
– Andre Aciman

Call Me by Your Name is Andre Aciman’s first novel, and what a debut. I will always envy writers who get something so right on their first (public) attempt. But the fact is, he was an accomplished writer of non-fiction for nearly two decades, a period in which he published only one work of fiction, a short story, before it was published in 2007. (The film was another decade in the making.)

He honed his craft writing memoirs, mostly. The time he dedicated to the development of his voice and narrative style comes through from the first sentence of his this book. Aciman’s voice is his own. No other writer working today expresses their thoughts in the way that he does. He distinguishes himself with impeccably chosen, precisely rendered and profoundly emotional sentences. It is the simple, effortless way in which he can express complex emotions that makes his writing beloved. He writes what so many of us think, but would hesitate to say, for fear of sounding silly. And he does so in a touching, human way that demonstrates that we might, indeed, sound silly, but that there are far worse things in life. The regret that comes from risks not taken, for example.

Aciman is a romantic. Which many of us are at heart, thought we may not care to admit it. The love story he tells in Call Me by Your Name is about Elio and Oliver, but it could be about anyone – which is the point. The theme is universal, the story is one we already know, but the author makes it new. He allows it to be romantic, almost sweepingly so, without slipping into sentimentality (which is no easy feat.) This may be a love story, but it is a literary one that does not bend to cliche, which makes it lovely to read even if, like all love stories, we know it can’t end happily.

…it does not. But you’d already figured that out.

Almost no one chooses to read a love story expecting surprises. And you won’t find any in Call Me by Your Name. The plot is what you will expect, which is not a criticism. Aciman wrote it, seemingly, with one goal in mind – to tell a love story simply, beautifully and well. And he achieved that, delivering a novel that is a pleasure to read time and again, no matter how it ends.

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