“Four, five pages later, I realized: This is Sami.” “As soon as she left, I started writing about a guy sitting on a train meeting a woman who’s half his age,” Aciman said. Later, as he departed by train, he opened his laptop to work on an essay about his late father. In 2016, Aciman traveled to Bordighera-the Italian city where Call Me by Your Name was set-to receive honorary citizenship. They may be challenged, though, by some of Aciman’s other riffs on the subject.Īs before, the novel originated as a play on autofiction. The tension of the novel stems from the same dilemma spelled out in Call Me by Your Name: “Is it better to speak or stay silent?” Put another way, should desire win, no matter the consequences? Fans will ache to hear how Oliver and Elio answer that question. Rotating among three different characters’ points of view in four chapters that span decades, Aciman reveals that the men have spent swaths of their life separated but nonetheless pining for each other. Fans have begged Aciman for years to write a sequel, and the 68-year-old’s fifth novel, Find Me, indeed returns to Oliver and Elio. Now he has, again, followed his whims-and his characters’-in a way that would, again, seem to serve a wider cultural hunger. The nature of wanting was.įinding Love on the Dance Floor in Call Me by Your Name Brandon Tensley Queerness as a social force-as a community and an identity with history and politics-wasn’t on his mind. If Aciman defied this tradition with Call Me by Your Name, it was only by accident. Gay literature has been largely defined by thwarted desire and tragic endings, stretching through Victorian fiction’s closeted subtexts to the persecution elegy of James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room to the AIDS-era anguish of Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart. In the decade since its publication, Call Me by Your Name has grown from an object of niche devotion to one of mainstream interest, in great part because Aciman chose to give Elio and Oliver what they wanted: each other. And so Aciman ended up having to describe plenty of sex, including a now-legendary scene involving the penetration of a peach. It was more “fun,” he said, to write him alive than dead. I don’t like to write about sex, believe it or not.”īut at every juncture when it came time to kill off Oliver, Aciman spared him. “I didn’t want to consummate their love,” Aciman told me when I visited him at the sparsely decorated but spacious Upper West Side apartment where he has lived with his wife for three decades. Or that maybe he’d go back to the United States. These references were meant to foreshadow that Oliver would drown. As Aciman unspooled the 17-year-old Elio’s inner monologue of desire for the handsome intruder down the hall, he implanted references to the writer Percy Shelley’s 1822 death off the Italian coast. It then mutated again so that the object of obsession became a man: Oliver, a swaggering American grad student on a summer residency. Along the way, it mutated into a tale about a boy lusting after a woman at his family’s villa. Their love story was almost a death story.Īciman’s novel began as a writing exercise about the author’s plans for a visit to Italy. E lio and Oliver, the lovers at the center of André Aciman’s 2007 novel, Call Me by Your Name, and its 2017 Oscar-winning film adaptation, have a claim to enjoying one of the most cherished gay trysts in all of modern fiction.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |