He does, and the two have the kind of unreal conversation people have in independent films. As the book opens, the man, now quite amicably divorced from Elio’s mother, is on a train bound for Rome, fretting over whether to flirt with Miranda, a much younger woman sharing his compartment.
Perhaps understanding that he faces a significant hurdle-I defy you not to picture bland stud Armie Hammer and emo twink Timothée Chalamet as you read-Aciman focuses on Sami, Elio’s father. Aciman is more interested in the intimacies of lovers than in the world at large.Īmira Casar and Michael Stuhlbarg in Luca Guadagnino's Call Me by Your Name, 2017. Find Me jumps ahead to the mid-2000s, though the only evidence of this is the characters’ cell phones. Name is set in the 1980s, though it has no firm location in time. In his fifth novel, Find Me (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $27), Aciman returns to the characters Guadagnino made famous and the milieu at which the author is so adept: educated people knocking around Europe. It’s bittersweet and well done (if you only know the film you may know the bitter more than the sweet). The book’s coda sees the lovers reunite fifteen and then twenty years later, at which point Elio’s beloved father, Sami, has died. Time pauses for orgasm, but it passes nonetheless. Oliver returns to America, where a woman is waiting to be his bride, but this isn’t a story about gay and straight it’s about sex and death, those old pals. Once the two tumble into bed, though, the story is time’s inevitable passage. The first half of the book is like this-fevered, adolescent, dirty, silly. My Star of David, his Star of David, our two necks like one, two cut Jewish men joined together from time immemorial. The humor of the words themselves amused me. If he didn’t touch me, then I’d be the one to touch him, and if he didn’t respond, I’d let my mouth boldly go to places it’d never been before. You can hear it in Elio’s words above the book is about sex, as pleasure, as power, as consumption, both active and passive.Īnd right away I’d take off my pajama bottoms and slip into his bed.
Restraint-a lick instead of a semen-filled bite-is the antithesis of what makes Aciman’s book so good. That says all that need be said about the film. In Luca Guadagnino’s adaptation of Aciman’s book, the older man, Oliver, simply licks the sodden fruit, while the younger, Elio, protests. You already know that Call Me by Your Name involves peach fucking, just as you know that Fatal Attraction involves bunny boiling such is the power of cinema. In the heat of passion it would have been one thing. They’re not even in flagrante delicto it’s only barely a sex act. Later, his older lover, a family houseguest, finds the fruit and eats it in front of him, slowly, deliberately. There’s a scene in André Aciman’s 2007 novel Call Me by Your Name in which a teenage boy ejaculates inside a peach.