I finally got around to reading the novel “Call Me by Your Name” by Andre Aciman. The gorgeously poetic prose narrated by Elio takes you to a new romantic world. We fall into moments of a passionate brilliantly obsessive love. The book ends 20 years after the ending of the film. The regrets and parallel universe make for an emotionally rich experience. ( )

What kept me from caring about these characters and their story? Astonishing privilege? Staggering self-absorption? Adolescent solipsism?

With several recommenders, I settled in to enjoy or appreciate good writing. While the writing was indeed good—creating lush setting and vivid inner dialog (thus three stars), I found the pages difficult to turn because I just didn't care.

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Started reading this on a clement spring day down by a small river nearby. I should keep doing that more often. It's getting a bit hot to be outside for very long as we head into summer, though.

The movie of this was one of my most hotly-anticipated since last year - it wasn't coming out in Japan until April, so I caved around February and torrented it. It made me so nostalgic for European summers, and the romance was nice, too. I read the book in April a couple of months after watching the movie, still fresh enough in my mind, and I watched the movie again a few days after finishing the novel. It's something I don't do very often, so it's interesting to see the parallels and divergences.

Aciman's prose is lush, perhaps over-flowery sometimes, and especially the beginning was written in a stream of consciousness style. It drew me in, though, and I thoroughly enjoyed the book. Glad I read it now, sad I didn't read it when it was originally released, I guess. ( )

I finished this book partly because I couldn't understand what it was that I didn't like about it, so I kept reading to try and figure it out. I'm still not entirely sure what is wrong with it. There is plenty of evidence that Aciman can write, with much of the prose having a good rhythm and well-chosen vocabulary. Often this is enough to get me on board with a novel, but Call Me by Your Name has such major flaws that style alone is not enough.

The first of these flaws is that the sections which are not well written are very ugly, with long, meandering sentences that add nothing to the reader's understanding of the story or their emotional connection to it. As a result I found myself mired in passages that I just didn't know how to get through. I'd struggle on, only to find that some important information had been hidden in amongst the waffle and occasionally have to back track. When the writing is poor, some of the metaphors are baffling - and quite distancing for the reader - and the references to Greek or Roman mythology added nothing for me.

The second major flaw is that there is no plot. Generally I'm happy to define plot very broadly, as any motivating element to the narrative, but in Call Me by Your Name there is none. The characters don't seem to want anything, not even clarity as to their own desires, and so whether the story moves through time, or jumps back and forth across time is irrelevant, because there is no texture to the surface they are traversing.

This problem is exacerbated by the third flaw, which is that I found the characters unlikable. The two main characters, the narrator, Elio, and the visiting scholar, Oliver, are so changeable and deceptive that they essentially have no character for the first half of the book. When they finally do acquire some substance it is instantly submerged again as life rolls on and neither seems to put up much resistance against it. It seems that thirty pages before the end we're told that Elio experienced much more important relationships later in his life, and yet the final twenty pages are dedicated to how Elio's relationship with Olliver was the most important in his life. I'm hesitant to call this a contradiction, because it seems much more likely that I didn't understand what the author was trying to say.

Which goes back to my assessment of the prose in this book. Maybe even though the good sections have all the hallmarks of good prose in rhythm and tone, the words don't actually add up to much. Maybe the ugly parts are actually a better representation of the quality of this book than the pretty ones. ( )

4.8/5 ( )