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  • Cris De Coeur
  • Ed Minus (bio)
Call Me By Your Name by André Aciman (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007. 248 pages. $23)

Madame de Staël reckoned love to be “self-love à deux,” and perhaps that is one way to understand the title of André Aciman’s stylish first novel. Elio, the first-person narrator, is a high-school student living with his parents on the Italian Riviera; and the object of his yearning is Oliver, a handsome American professor, seven years Elio’s senior, who has come to live with the family for a summer in order to revise the manuscript of his first book (on the pre-Socratics) prior to publication. In exchange Oliver helps Elio’s father with his undemanding correspondence and other paperwork. Most of the first quarter of the novel entails Elio’s scrupulous [End Page xl] account of his consuming awareness of Oliver—an awareness fraught with desire, confusion, doubt, and fear. It is probably in part fear of loss of self that blinds Elio to the possibility that Oliver may be suffering similar pangs of longing; and Aciman skillfully allows the reader to guess that this may be the case. As the two young men agonize in silence their mutual infatuation builds toward passion. At last it is Elio who makes his secret known—and finds it matched—and for the next six weeks he and Oliver share the lush pleasures of unbridled physical and sexual intimacy.

Mr. Aciman is a much-admired essayist who has written evocatively about many parts of the world. What then could have led him to set his novel on the Riviera? It is a decision hard to account for except in terms of romantic overkill. Surely the Riviera is as close to geoliterary cliché as any place on earth, and all the familiar props are here: the scorching sun, the scent of skin and sweat, the sea and sunbathing, the biking, the tennis, the grappa, the light, loose, revealing clothes, the espadrilles, the servants who are almost family. And on and on. Who wouldn’t fall in love? With oneself if no one else. I think for contrast of the fun of getting to know the eponymous city of Michael Chabon’s The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, another first (and first-person) novel with a similar theme and a good deal more in the way of plot. And there is a still more basic difference: A. D. Nuttall, in his bracingly intelligent new book Shakespeare the Thinker, reminds us that “the same story can be comic if told fast and tragic if told slowly.” Art Bechstein, Chabon’s narrator, is a much more lighthearted fellow than Elio, and his story bounces along to a nicely ambiguous ending. The final thirty-five pages of Call Me By Your Name, in an overdue change of pace and structure, move us forward several decades, allowing both Oliver, now married, and Elio, serially partnered, a perspective that induces desolating nostalgia.

I was also reminded of a novel close to half a century older than Chabon’s, for early in Aciman’s book I realized that in my mind’s eye both Elio and Oliver resembled the desirable sixteen-year-old boy named Phil in the first novel to be signed simply Collette. In what I believe to be the latest translation (by Zack Rogow, Sarabande Books, 2004) that novel is titled Green Wheat; earlier translations are titled The Ripening Seed (Collette’s title is Le Ble en herbe). The novel is set in Brittany in summer; and as so often in Collette the natural world, closely observed, is a strong but never romanticized presence. The other characters are Phil’s girlfriend, Vinca, and Madame Delleray, an older woman much taken with Phil (a more subtle Mrs. Robinson). Unlike Aciman and Chabon, Collette chose to tell her story in third person, thereby avoiding the tone of gratuitous confession and the (consequent?) lapses in control of voice that give one pause now and then in Aciman’s novel. Perhaps it is also the unmediated access to her characters that makes Green Wheat more erotic, though far less explicit, than Call Me By Your Name...

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