Reviews - Call Me By Your Name

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22k reviews for:

"Today, the pain, the stoking, the thrill of someone new, the promise of so much bliss hovering a fingertip away, the fumbling around people I might misread and don’t want to lose and must second-guess at every turn, the desperate cunning I bring to everyone I want and crave to be wanted by, the screens I put up as though between me and the world there were not just one but layers of rice-paper sliding doors, the urge to scramble and unscramble what was never really coded in the first place—all these started the summer Oliver came into our house. They are embossed on every song that was a hit that summer, in every novel I read during and after his stay, on anything from the smell of rosemary on hot days to the frantic rattle of the cicadas in the afternoon—smells and sounds I’d grown up with and known every year of my life until then but that had suddenly turned on me and acquired an inflection forever colored by the events of that summer."

shaun_winford's review against another edition

5.0

This book is more beautifully written than anything I've read in my life.
It's not even a book, it's a poem. It is made of pure emotions, and every tingling of Elio's emotions were made palpable to me. I might be nothing like him, and yet I feel everything as if I were Elio myself.
I like reading about people who love another very much. But none of the things I've read or written myself felt so authentic, so feel-able, and so intense. I'm really satisfied with this book. It made me laugh, it made me cry, and it let me experience things I didn't know I could. And it explored the depth of human emotions when it comes to love – I'm fed up with stories of happy ever after or permanent love that would go on until the two are old and wrinkled. Elio and Oliver's story demonstrated what I believe to be the truest nature of love: something like a star that you embark on a quest to get, and you only get once in your life. And it is possible to have too much life between the two for that love to become a spectral existence.

I must say that Aciman made very good use of symbolism and evoked such strong nostalgia. Every time something is mentioned again it struck me pretty hard. That's not easy to do, and I hope I could do half as well as he could.

I'm writing this past midnight after I finally finished it. This is certainly a book I'm going to read again in my life.

geallen144's review against another edition

4.5

emotional reflective sad medium-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Character

Strong character development: Yes

Loveable characters: Yes

Diverse cast of characters: No

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

emilyreadsnovels's review against another edition

3.0

3.5 ⭐️ Rounded up.

I have a lot of complicated feelings about this book, the most obvious being the age difference. Elio is so young and naive, he doesn’t understand the complexity of his emotions. So many parts had my heart bursting in affection for Elio, how he knows that whatever the outcome of his relationship with Oliver, it will still end regardless, and how he will be haunted by the brief time they shared. I think for that reason alone I rated this book higher than I expected.