to love and be loved...

I think the quote on the cover pictured here is a good place for me to try to sort out my jumble of emotional, tangled thoughts concerning this novel: "A beautiful and wise book... A miracle." This book is beautiful in its setting along the Italian Riviera, in its descriptions of a tranquil, hot, spellbound countryside full of days meant for leisure and contemplation. It's also beautiful in its depiction of how far-reaching, strong, and simultaneously terrifying love, or the notion of loving another person, can be as told through the raw story of Elio and Oliver. This novel is also wise in its endless analogies and comments on the way that humans think and feel and think about how we feel. I felt as if this book wrote itself and was aware of how very metaphysical humans and their bodies and their desires all are when you really try to sit down and understand them. I think what I loved most about this novel was that it was told through seventeen-year-old Elio's perspective, which means that this novel is an eloquent stream-of-consciousness masterpiece. Elio's character and self-awareness are captivating, as they made me as the reader think about how I would try to go about articulating feelings of sexual arousal and unexplainable attraction when I was his age. Elio's is a perspective that made me think about the entire human voice throughout time, how we as a race of loving beings will forever be attempting to articulate how love functions, hurts, flourishes, lives, and dies for as long as we keep existing. Then there's the character of Oliver, who felt simultaneously distant and just a breath away as Elio explored what it would potentially look like to fall head first into the pool of feelings and desires that were practically eating him alive before set free to swim out in the open, whether Oliver returned said feelings or not. It is the very fact that these two young men (though straddling seven years of an age difference between them) did feel the same exhilarating rush of feeling for each other from nearly the moment they laid eyes on each other that makes me sit and think until my head nearly hurts about the nature of two people loving each other. I think, when I look back on this novel and everything about it, I will return to several things. I will return to the question of 'Why these two?' as in, why does it seem like fate decided that these two souls should thirst for each other in such an achingly tangible way that I felt it on every page of the book in my hands? Why not two other people, and why so powerfully? I will return to my realization that having a soulmate - and then impossibly finding it - doesn't necessarily mean that two souls will end up living out their numbered days alongside one another, but rather perhaps incites the possibility of a lifetime of longing for that soul that's never quite close enough when life gets in the way. And I will forever return to the section towards the end of the book where Elio speaks with his father, who has known about him and Oliver nearly since its inception - I'll return to the tears I shed for the way a father softly spoke to his son of grief and love and the importance of letting oneself feel even when it is bound to hurt. The tears I shed for this section and the sections that follow, those sections that end the book and show, in so many words, the two lives Elio and Oliver spend apart whilst continuing to remember each other and the memories of what they did and shared one summer long ago, are tears I shed with a strange mixture of sorrow and happiness. The impact this book has had on me and how I view the neverendingly complex concept of love will speak to how I view intimacy and its beautiful possibilities. How letting someone call you by their name allows the blending of identities and titles until boundaries no longer have to exist and even deeper intimacy can introduce itself. 



Some of my favorite quotes from Call Me By Your Name:

"But it might have started way later than I think without my noticing anything at all."

"I liked how our minds seemed to travel in parallel, how we instantly inferred what words the other was toying with but at the last moment held back."

"Let summer never end, let him never go away, let the music on perpetual replay play on forever, I'm asking for very little, and I swear I'll ask for nothing more."

"'I know nothing, Oliver. Nothing, just nothing.'
'You know more than anyone around here.'
...
'If you only knew how little I know about the things that really matter.'"

"This felt special. Like showing someone your private chapel, your secret haunt, the place where, as with the berm, one comes to be alone, to dream of others. This is where I dreamed of you before you came into my life."

"There they were, the legacy of youth, the two mascots of my life, hunger and fear, watching over me, saying, So many before you have taken the chance and been rewarded, why can't you? No answer. And then it came, as ever deriding me: If not later, Elio, when?"

"I needed him as far away as possible if I was to feel better and forget--but I needed him close by in case this thing took a turn for the worse and there was no one to turn to."

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

"Fancy this, I might say: at the time I knew Oliver, I still hadn't met so-and-so. Yet life without so-and-so was simply unthinkable."

"'Elio,' I repeated, to say it was I speaking but also to spark our old game and show I'd forgotten nothing. 'It's Oliver,' he said. He had forgotten."

"... I had finally encountered the life that was right for me but had failed to have."

"'And we'll want to call it envy, because to call it regret would break our hearts.'"

"'You are the only person I'd like to say goodbye to when I die, because only then will this thing I call my life make any sense...'"

---