Call Me by Your Name

**Audio Version 11/17 –11/22 **I purposely strung out this listen as long as possible, but also there were moments when I just had to stop. [a:Armie Hammer 17203599 Armie Hammer https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/user/u_50x66-632230dc9882b4352d753eedf9396530.png]'s narration is pitch perfect. Somehow, in spite the story being told from Elio's POV, the narration, at least for me, provided insight to Oliver's mind. Many have opined on this “age difference” thing and I must say that I just don't see it. Oliver is 24!!! Yes he is teaching and is writing a book and can be as erudite as you like, but he's 24. A babe in the woods. As for the actual babe, Elio, has there been a more precocious 17 year-old? I think if time and circumstance had been different they are equally and perfectly matched and I'm sure that's what Elio would have wished for. Another thing I was reminded of, by the narration, is how much Elio lives in his head. I can wholeheartedly empathize with him. I was that person and perhaps still am to no small degree. shrugsLastly a word of advice: don't listen to the last two ‘chapters' of this audio in public. You'll find yourself ugly-crying on the train and it won't be a pretty sight. This may or may have not happened to me. Just saying.Next stop: The Movie.****************First read 7/28/16—8/1/16I've been punched in the gut.This is a story about remembrance and time; first loves that mark a before and after, the regret for the un-lived life that we can never get back. The bulk of the story takes place the summer when Elio is 17 and like every summer his parents are, as is their yearly tradition, hosting a young academic. That year it was Oliver, a professor at Columbia working on his doctorate.With his prose André Aciman envelops us in what it feels like to be young, smart, curious and falling off the deep cliff that is first love and never making it back to the other side. “Did I want to be like him? Did I want to be him? Or did I just want to have him? Or are “being” and “having” thoroughly inaccurate verbs in the twisted skein of desire, where having someone's body to touch and being that someone we're longing to touch are one and the same, just opposite banks on a river that passes from us to them, back to us and over to them again in a perpetual circuit where the chambers of the heart, like the trapdoors of desire, and the wormholes of time, and the false-bottomed drawer we call identity share a beguiling logic according to which the shortest distance between real life and the life unlived, between who we are and what we want, is a twisted staircase designed with the impish cruelty of M. C. Escher.”and this: “Perhaps the physical and metaphorical meanings are clumsy ways of understanding what happens when two beings need, not just to be close together, but to become to totally ductile that each becomes the other. To be who I am because of you. To be who he was because of me. To be in his mouth while he was in mine and no longer know whose it was, his cock or mine, that was in my mouth. He was my secret conduit to myself - like a catalyst that allows us to become who we are, the foreign body, the pacer, the graft, the patch that sends all the right impulses, the steel pin that keeps a soldier's bone together, the other man's heart that makes us more us than we were before the transplant.” Inevitably time passes and the summer is over and we come to an adult Elio revisiting that long ago summer of all consuming love/lust and opportunity lost:“We belonged to each other, but had lived so far apart that we belonged to others now. Squatters, and only squatters, were the true claimants to our lives.” This about killed me, and then there was this: “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. And if I should hear that you died, my life as I know it, the me who is speaking with you now, will cease to exist.” I'd recommend this to anyone and everyone. This book is a thing of beauty that will bring tears to your eyes but also, if you're lucky, make you remember that time when everything was possible and nothing could be done.“Twenty years was yesterday, and yesterday was just earlier this morning, and morning seemed light-years away.”