Lelyana's Reviews: BOOK REVIEW : Call Me by Your Name by André Aciman

Call Me by Your Name is the story of a sudden and powerful romance that blossoms between an adolescent boy and a summer guest at his parents' cliff-side mansion on the Italian Riviera. Unprepared for the consequences of their attraction, at first each feigns indifference. But during the restless summer weeks that follow, unrelenting buried currents of obsession and fear, fascination and desire, intensify their passion as they test the charged ground between them. What grows from the depths of their spirits is a romance of scarcely six weeks' duration and an experience that marks them for a lifetime. For what the two discover on the Riviera and during a sultry evening in Rome is the one thing both already fear they may never truly find again: total intimacy.

The psychological maneuvers that accompany attraction have seldom been more shrewdly captured than in André Aciman's frank, unsentimental, heartrending elegy to human passion. Call Me by Your Name is clear-eyed, bare-knuckled, and ultimately unforgettable.

Call Me by Your Name by André Aciman
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Breathtaking

Captivating, breathtaking, heartbreaking.
I invented my heart for Elio and Oliver. I'm such a mess right now.
One of the best book I have ever read.
Highly recommended.

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

Boy oh boy, when I told you I was such a mess and cannot think of other books for more than a week (and this going to stay a lot longer that I expected), I said the truth. These two, Elio and Oliver captured my heart, broke it, and never had intention to put it back together.
This book (at least for me), is more like Elio's memoir of his first crush, his first lush, and his first love. Oliver.

I read the book, listened to the audiobook, watched the movies (over and over and over again).
No books has ever made me this way. I was sad, angry, in love, frustrated and of course brokenhearted.
I don't think I'll give you spoiler, because everyone who read this book, watched the movie, the story made clear that even Elio and Oliver loved each other, the love they'd shared, not quite strong enough to admitted to the whole world, that they didn't give a fuck about "what they are", and go on with their love.

I hated Oliver for leaving Elio hanging, and hated Elio for let his feeling grew too strong for Oliver. I hated them. I loved them. I don't know. Maybe, maybe ut was right when Elio said

We had found the stars, you and I. And this is given once only.

God! How I wish they reached the stars and keep it with them and didn't let anybody ripped it away from them, you know. And be happy. Until twenty years later, or more twenty or more.

This book reminds me or many of us for that matter, about our first love, one that never really forgotten. Reminds me, that one moment in our life, we had a beautiful life, beautiful hopes and dreams, that life would never go wrong, that life would be just like what us wanted to be.
But oh how wrong can it be?

I suddenly realized that we were on borrowed time, that time is always borrowed, and that the lending agency exacts its premium precisely when we are least prepared to pay and need to borrow more.

I can, from the distance of years now, still think I’m hearing the voices of two young men singing these words in Neapolitan toward daybreak, neither realizing, as they held each other and kissed again and again on the dark lanes of old Rome, that this was the last night they would ever make love again.

Twenty years was yesterday, and yesterday was just earlier this morning, and morning seemed light-years away. “I’m like you,” he said. “I remember everything.” I stopped for a second. If you remember everything, I wanted to say, and if you are really like me, then before you leave tomorrow, or when you’re just ready to shut the door of the taxi and have already said goodbye to everyone else and there’s not a thing left to say in this life, then, just this once, turn to me, even in jest, or as an afterthought, which would have meant everything to me when we were together, and, as you did back then, look me in the face, hold my gaze, and call me by your name.