In an Unknown Region
Call Me by Your Name
by André Aciman.
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2007,
$23.00 cloth.
Near the Italian seaside village of B., at his family's villa, in summer, a boy falls in love with a man. A one-season, one-song sort of tale, Call Me by Your Name seems at first to be a slim novel of reminiscence, of what Roland Barthes calls (in A Lover's Discourse) "anamnesis" —"which recovers only insignificant features in no way dramatic, as if I remembered time itself and only time: it is a fragrance without support, a texture of memory." But for André Aciman, time itself is an open wound, reason enough for finding a way to narrate the amorous scene.
The narrator of Aciman's novel is Elio, a precocious and bookish teenager. Every summer his family hosts young academics who come to work on their dissertations, enjoy the warm Mediterranean, and help Elio's father with his paperwork. The year Elio is seventeen, Oliver is the new houseguest, a young professor specializing in the pre-Socratics.
The story begins on the day of Oliver's arrival in B., but the narrator cannot quite locate the start of it all. "Maybe it started soon after his arrival," Elio says. Then a page or two later he wonders: "Or perhaps it started on the beach." Before we know it he has changed his mind again: "But it might have started way later than I think without my noticing anything at all." The time that has passed obscures not just the beginning of the romance but the origin of this peculiar desire, this desire that is somehow unspeakably but decidedly different.
"When I think back to that summer, I can never sort the sequence of events. There are a few key scenes. Otherwise, all I can remember are 'repeat' moments." And so he recounts them and recounts them again. Each morning Oliver and Elio spread their work out in the yard. Later there are bike rides into town, long naps in the shadowed quiet of the bedroom, dinners and dreadful dinner guests, ice cream, lemonade, the cinema. Barthes's "insignificant features" are all the smells and colors and sounds of the Italian Riviera: the light across the pool, the sound of a bicycle on the gravel drive, the surf against the rocky shore, "the rich brown cloistral scent of coffee." The prose drips with the intoxicating flavors of the Mediterranean. In the foreground of these recollections is Oliver: the tone of his voice, either playful or dismissive, his straw hat, his swimsuit, his ankle. The details provide a second layer of obscurity; once conjured, they take the adult narrator back into the body of his seventeen-year-old self, where the reminiscence, no longer safely contained, has acquired a terrorizing immediacy.
One moment Elio is certain that Oliver likes him and the next he is more certain that Oliver actually hates him, finds him a nuisance, does not in any way return his affection. This is as disorienting for the reader as it is for him. Though Elio confesses to a passionate night early on in the novel, the narrative loops and lags so that the difference between the memory of fantasy and the memory of reality is never entirely clear. Elio's nostalgia for this summer begins to resemble desire itself: the slightest breeze inspires incessant reexamination and reinvention of the scene, and each layer of detail only heightens his ambivalence.
In one of his essays, Aciman describes the motion of nostalgia as an exercise in which the mind turns on itself again and again without arriving anywhere distinct. He calls it "palintropic": a set of systematic reversals. "I project these reversals on everything, because it is in finding reversals that I am able to find myself." Much of Aciman's nonfiction has been an exploration of these reversals. His first book, Out of Egypt, published in 1994, was a memoir of his childhood in Alexandria—a portrait of an eccentric Jewish family and a city in a now-gone age of cosmopolitanism. In the end, the family is forced to leave Egypt for Europe. This was Aciman's first experience with loss, as expatriation.
He discovers Alexandria again in the essays of False Papers, a collection of focused studies on the method of memory. The lost city is recorded in the shadowed parks and streets of other cities. But these cities, too, will be lost. Some of them are lost before they are ever found. Nostalgia arrives without warning when we realize that our very dispossession of a place, a person, a memory, is the strongest hold we'll ever have on them. Throughout these memoirs, Aciman is always trying to understand the ways the past works on the present. "The real site of nostalgia," Aciman writes in "Pensione Eolo," "is not the place that was lost or the place that was never quite had in the first place; it is the text that must record that loss." Cities, like books, are places to return to, and travel, like reading or writing, is a way of seeking out a former and becoming self. Stendhal, Svevo, Heraclitus, even Saint Augustine—like Rome, Paris, New York —not only inspire return but guide Aciman to an understanding of exile, and of the broken heart.
But his true Virgil has always been Proust. "How admirable his knowledge," Aciman writes of Proust in The Proust Project, a volume he edited in 2004,
that it is always better to feel something, anything, than to feel nothing at all, that human beings should and want to feel things, and that we are each of us heat-seeking subjects starved for feeling, which is why, even at the risk of getting hurt or making tremendous fools of ourselves, we will not shirk from being drawn to certain places...to memory, to music, to vice, and, of course, to other human beings, because by so doing each of us finds a secret, private conduit to an inner life that is not just our new life but our true life.
Proust is not just the muse who paces the spiraling, sensuous narrative of Call Me by Your Name; his mark is also found in the profound psychological texture of the novel. The labyrinthine journey toward intimacy, which mirrors the journey taken again in the recollection of desire, does not simply lead to the discovery of the forgotten and the obscured aspects of being, but to a wholly unexpected self.
When Elio sees that Oliver openly wears the Star of David, it is the first signpost on this path to self-recognition. Elio has never before considered himself free to do such a thing: "Staring at his neck with its star and telltale amulet was like staring at something timeless, ancestral, immortal in me, in him, in both of us, begging to be rekindled and brought back from its millenary sleep." Judaism in Elio's family, like homosexuality, has always been something to be discreet about. And like the discovery of all things that are not defined by our cultural upbringing—certain ways of being sexual, spiritual, artistic, or intellectual, for which we have not for whatever reason found a road map—the journey can be solitary, terrifying.
Elio's anxiety, and his ambivalence toward this unnamable thing, this it that he sees reflected back to him in Oliver, gains amplitude as the summer marches on:
All of these hours were strained by fear, as if fear were a brooding specter...I didn't know what I was afraid of, nor why I worried so much, nor why this thing that could so easily cause panic felt like hope sometimes and, like hope in the darkest moments, brought such joy, unreal joy, joy with a noose tied around it. The thud my heart gave when I saw him unannounced both terrified and thrilled me. I was afraid when he showed up, afraid when he failed to, afraid when he looked at me, more frightened yet when he didn't.
Elio learns to combat this turmoil by becoming its willful subject: he strikes up a romance with a local girl, Marzia, tempting a more carefully charted kind of passion. At the same time, he finds himself making seductive gestures toward Oliver—though at first he can only find the courage when he is totally alone. One afternoon, when the house is abandoned, he climbs into Oliver's bed, in Oliver's swimsuit. These scenes are marked by their obsessive myopia: "I found a large peach in the fruit bowl and began to pare it...I wanted to slice it and then cut the pieces into smaller pieces, and the smaller pieces into yet smaller ones." Later, he grows bolder. On an outing into the village, Elio takes Oliver to a favorite spot, a berm, where Monet used to paint. There Elio first makes a sort of confession of his desire. It is received tentatively, almost tepidly.
If this is agony for the reader, it is because it is so familiar. Just beyond that crepuscular Mediterranean sky is the memory of our own first love. As with Proust, Aciman's story is a porous text through which we cannot help but recall scenes from our own lives. We hold our breath for the inevitable devastation. When the long-anticipated moment does finally arrive, Elio, too, seems to have recovered something long buried:
I had, as I'd never before in my life, the distinct feeling of arriving somewhere very dear, of wanting this forever, of being me, me, me, me, and no one else, just me, of finding in each shiver that ran down my arms something totally alien and yet by no means unfamiliar, as if all this had been part of me all my life and I'd misplaced it and he had helped me find it...this was like coming home.
This is devastating, however, because the homecoming can't last. Elio's passion turns to revulsion, to shame, to self-loathing, and, by afternoon, has become passion again. The rhythm of reversals that began benignly with a question of reciprocated desire has turned to interior torment. What Elio discovers, in the moment and again in its recollection, is an even more contradictory and slippery self than he could have imagined. This, too, is a lesson from Proust. "It is because we've lost our way," Aciman writes in the introduction to The Proust Project, "and because our habits can no longer come to our rescue that we struggle to put our world back together again—and in the process catch glimpses of an ancillary, adjacent, undisclosed netherworld."
Call Me descends into this netherworld with the bawdy, titillating language of sexual intimacy, but cannot avoid the burn of what James Baldwin calls, in Giovanni's Room, "the underside and aftermath of passion." In that novel, the strong scent of Paris is infused with what cannot be spoken, which is in part the impossibility of homosexual love in a world that slowly conspires to crush it. Call Me is not similarly afflicted; the stakes in the unusual friendship between Oliver and Elio are considerably lower. (Elio's family will not disown him; their sexuality will not drive either lover into the hands of violence.) Even so, Elio is destroyed by what he finds in Oliver and reconfigured by its subsequent loss.
Eventually, the amorous scene must be abandoned. The two go to Rome on a trip that is at once a honeymoon and a farewell. Here the emotional register becomes more elegiac. Elio knows that once Oliver returns to the United States, the part of himself so difficultly discovered and tenuously held will be gone. To prepare for his grief, the boy asks Oliver to leave him with a few artifacts: a swimsuit, a pair of sunglasses, a shirt he calls "Billowy." Like Gilgamesh in the skin of the lion, he will hold on to the costume to enable a return to that inconstant time of intimacy—to enable, in a way, the telling of this story.
Kathryn Crim is the associate editor of The Threepenny Review.
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