Call Me By Your Name by André Aciman: a review

Okay, so I went into this book having no real idea of the plot but knew that it had somewhat of a reputation. I wasn’t sure if that reputation came from the film, but from what I can tell plot wise, the two are much of a muchness, and the controversy appears to be with the substance of the book/film rather than any part of one or the other. I only really knew two things going in: the age gap (which I will cover) and the peach scene (which I will also be covering, but I don’t think I’ll be recovering. Eyyy. God, I wish I didn’t have to think about that scene.).

This review contains references to the content warnings below. These warnings are not just for the book itself. Also, spoiler alert. I want to be able to discuss this book in full.

            CW: sexual content, possibly uncomfortable age gap, unthinkable happenings with fruit, too much feet talk.

Call Me By Your Name by André Aciman is a romance set in Italy. Seventeen-year-old Elio meets philosophy scholar, Oliver, who is a guest at Elio’s family home. Feelings begin to blossom no matter how hard the two of them attempt to push them down, and a fiery desire begins to emerge as they begin to grow closer. While their encounter lasts no more than six weeks, it stays with them for a lifetime.

            The first thing I want to talk about is the age gap. Now, I’m not going to get into the general ethics of age gap relationships, or even why it appears so prevalent in queer fiction. I’m simply discussing it in this novel. During the six weeks where the liaison takes place, Elio is seventeen, and Oliver is twenty-four. That, to me, is a little bit icky. I’m twenty-two, just two years younger than Oliver, and the thought of being romantic and sexual with a seventeen-year-old is frankly just a little bit grim. That’s a kid still trying to figure their life out. Oliver has his life pretty well sorted; he’s got his degree, published work, a job at a university. He is an established adult. Elio is just beginning to figure out what university he could possibly go to. So, while I did get invested in their story, and I did genuinely love the romance between them, there were points where I had to just think about the imbalance between them.

            I am never going to eat peaches for as long as I live. Now I knew there was a scene where someone gets his end away with a peach, but I don’t think anything could have prepared me for what it would be like to actually read it. Let me give you a short extract just so you can experience what I went through:

[…] thinking of no one in particular, including the poor peach, which had no idea what was being done to it except that it had to play along and probably in the end took some pleasure in the act as well, till I thought I heard it say to me, fuck me Elio, fuck me harder.

I simply sat there with my book in my lap, wide-eyed and slack jawed. Let me tell you, it only gets worse. So, after he’s, well, finished shall we say, he just puts the peach on the desk. Just leaves it there. Oh what? You thought it couldn’t get worse? Wrong. Incorrect. Oliver comes into the bedroom, and not only notices the peach that’s covered in Elio, but then decides to eat the damn thing, and not only that but then Elio decides to kiss Oliver as if that’s an appropriate thing to do in that moment.

            While we’re on the weird parts of this novel, there is too much talk of feet. I’m not judging anybody (not for this at least. I am judging Elio, Oliver, and André Aciman for that fucking peach scene. Maybe not the right phrasing). They’re just brought up a lot, and it’s simply not for me.

            The thing is, I thought this would be the sort of book that I would want to tear apart afterwards, but I really don’t. There are issues with it, don’t get me wrong, but there is real beauty in this book. The way Elio deals with, or rather often fails to deal with his feelings, is so believable and relatable. The pure panic that Elio feels whenever Oliver so much as looks at him is just, oh, it’s so good. Aciman’s exploration of first love and burgeoning sexuality is genuinely beautiful. There are these lines that just hit a part of my soul in the best possible way. For example, we have:

             Perhaps we were friends first and lovers second. But then perhaps this is what lovers are.

With lines like that, I can almost forgive the pea— actually, I can’t go that far. Seriously though, I got so invested in this story, and I had so many of those moments where, as I was reading, I pulled my knees up to me chest, bringing the book closer to me. I’d be doing this as tensions rose, and the pay offs were always killer.

            Being so invested meant that the ending, where the two of them are older, was just, well it was a lot. I won’t be spoiling this because I do think you should experience this for yourself. What I will say is that there was a lot of furious messaging to the one friend who I was live reacting to this book with as they’d read it before. There was a lot of incoherent yelling. While frustrating, it is exactly how the book should have ended. It left me with very complex feelings, but I was satisfied in the end.

            I actually do want to recommend this book to you. I think you should give it a go. It’s genuinely a lot of fun despite its flaws. I wasn’t expecting to love this book as much as I did, but here we are. It is available at Burnley Library, and I do think it well worth the read. As it stands, it might even make the top ten at the end of the yea given just how invested I got with it.