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A review by barel63
Call Me By Your Name - Screenplay by André Aciman, James Ivory
4.0
I am going to start this review on a tangent so if anyone is reading it, please bear with me for a few sentences. Many, many moons ago, when TED Talks were just starting and were still a whimsical and fun thing to watch, I discovered what remains my favourite talk to date: Ken Robinson's "Do schools kill creativity?" It's a thought provoking topic and Sir Robinson talks about the issue eloquently. After almost seven years since my discovery of his lecture, one particular line has stayed with me. He says, referring to academics that "[t]hey’re disembodied, you know, in a kind of literal way. They look upon their body as a form of transport for their heads."
I love this line! I love it in a self-deprecating manner as it hold some undeniable truths for me. First, because I am obsessed with academia and do often think of my body only as a vehicle for my head. And secondly, because I have a very fraught relationship to my physical body: I loath the physicality of being and hate my dependence on it at the same time. For a variety of reasons (a lot of it, I'm sure, has to do with gender) I have never been truly comfortable with who I am, body-wise. As a result, I have always envied people who were visibly comfortable in their bodies and able to go through life in such comfort as to be unaware of it, or aware of its needs and able to fulfil them with little guilt.
What I mean to say, in this round-about way, is that I envy this book (and its main character, Elio) the unabashed joy taken in everything that is physical, in everything that has to do with the body and the desire and pleasure that can be derived from the awareness/awareness of this same body. In a similar vein, this book is unashamedly emotional: there is little plot to it, it is basically a teenager's diary with all the insecurities and doubt, but also so much happiness and joy at the little things in life. I also envy teenage Elio's the ability to not worry to much about the ephemeral nature of everything, including our relationship to those we love. I love that the rawest emotions, albeit expressed in beautiful and contemplative prose, are never hidden behind pretentious monologues or convoluted metaphors. The writing can be sometimes bare.
If you have read Marilynne Robinson's Gilead, the main character in that book, speaks directly to this type of feeling when he says: “Sometimes I have loved the peacefulness of an ordinary Sunday. It is like standing in a newly planted garden after a warm rain. You can feel the silent and invisible life.” This book evokes exactly that same feeling.
It also helps that Aciman littered the narrative with lines and references to some of my favorite works (including lines from Proust, Nobokov's Lolita, Poe's Annabel Lee, and even T.S. Eliot's The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock). I'm a sucker for literary puzzles and analogies, just as I am sucker for any contemplation in fiction of time and memory and how we relate to one another, all stirred in with beautiful atmospheric prose.
This book has some problematic aspects to it, without a doubt. I didn't particularly care for the way Anchise was portrayed (closeted gay men that everyone thought was a creep, how did that make it through edits in a book that is supposedly about dismantling such stereotypes), literary party with the great minds of Italian literature (been to that type of party and it's actually a snooze-fest), if this were written by a woman it would absolutely be labelled as chick-flick instead of literary fiction, and don't even get me started on the portrayal of female characters throughout the novel --- and yet, this book is basically pandering to people like me and I'm all here for it, problematic behaviour be damned (or at least acknowledged).
I love this line! I love it in a self-deprecating manner as it hold some undeniable truths for me. First, because I am obsessed with academia and do often think of my body only as a vehicle for my head. And secondly, because I have a very fraught relationship to my physical body: I loath the physicality of being and hate my dependence on it at the same time. For a variety of reasons (a lot of it, I'm sure, has to do with gender) I have never been truly comfortable with who I am, body-wise. As a result, I have always envied people who were visibly comfortable in their bodies and able to go through life in such comfort as to be unaware of it, or aware of its needs and able to fulfil them with little guilt.
What I mean to say, in this round-about way, is that I envy this book (and its main character, Elio) the unabashed joy taken in everything that is physical, in everything that has to do with the body and the desire and pleasure that can be derived from the awareness/awareness of this same body. In a similar vein, this book is unashamedly emotional: there is little plot to it, it is basically a teenager's diary with all the insecurities and doubt, but also so much happiness and joy at the little things in life. I also envy teenage Elio's the ability to not worry to much about the ephemeral nature of everything, including our relationship to those we love. I love that the rawest emotions, albeit expressed in beautiful and contemplative prose, are never hidden behind pretentious monologues or convoluted metaphors. The writing can be sometimes bare.
If you have read Marilynne Robinson's Gilead, the main character in that book, speaks directly to this type of feeling when he says: “Sometimes I have loved the peacefulness of an ordinary Sunday. It is like standing in a newly planted garden after a warm rain. You can feel the silent and invisible life.” This book evokes exactly that same feeling.
It also helps that Aciman littered the narrative with lines and references to some of my favorite works (including lines from Proust, Nobokov's Lolita, Poe's Annabel Lee, and even T.S. Eliot's The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock). I'm a sucker for literary puzzles and analogies, just as I am sucker for any contemplation in fiction of time and memory and how we relate to one another, all stirred in with beautiful atmospheric prose.
This book has some problematic aspects to it, without a doubt. I didn't particularly care for the way Anchise was portrayed (closeted gay men that everyone thought was a creep, how did that make it through edits in a book that is supposedly about dismantling such stereotypes), literary party with the great minds of Italian literature (been to that type of party and it's actually a snooze-fest), if this were written by a woman it would absolutely be labelled as chick-flick instead of literary fiction, and don't even get me started on the portrayal of female characters throughout the novel --- and yet, this book is basically pandering to people like me and I'm all here for it, problematic behaviour be damned (or at least acknowledged).