Ya know how after you watch an episode of Lost , you can't stop thinkin about it? Well, I've just read the most incredible book that's done the same thing to me! It's called "Call Me By Your Name", by Andre Aciman. Aciman explains emotions and relationships like I've never seen. He gets so deeply into it, that while you're reading, you find yourself nodding your head in agreement. He's eloquent, tells a fantastic story, and at the end of the book, you can fully identify with the main character so much that it's almost like Aciman knows of your own personal heartbreak and wrote about it. A MUST READ for anyone who's into unconventional love stories.
Here's a gorgeous excerpt from Call Me By Your Name:
"In your place, if there is pain, nurse it, and if there is a flame, don't snuff it out, don't be brutal with it. Withdrawal can be a terrible thing when it keeps us awake at night, and watching others forget us sooner than we'd want to be forgotten is no better. We rip out so much of ourselves to be cured of things faster than we should that we go bankrupt by the age of thirty and have less to offer each time we start with someone new. But to feel nothing so as not to feel anything—what a waste!"
In case you don't believe me, here are some reviews:
NY Times Book Review
4.5 of 5 Stars
"This novel is hot...It is an exceptionally beautiful book that cannot quite bring itself to draw the inevitable conclusion about axis-shifting passion that men and women of the world might like to think they will always reach — that that obscure object of desire is, by definition, ungraspable, indeterminate and already lost at exactly the moment you rush so fervently to hold him or her." STACEY D’ERASMO
Boston Globe
4 of 5 Stars
"The novel is richly, sensuously detailed, from Elio’s testosterone-fueled fantasies to the pair’s passionate couplings to such vivid descriptions of the Italian countryside one can almost smell the ocean and feel the heat. … I kept wondering where the parents were in all this." KAREN CAMPBELL
San Francisco Chronicle
4 of 5 Stars
"The novel is told in retrospect; while most of the events take place over the course of a summer, this is the story of a man remembering an important moment in his past. Aciman carries the reader along by the fury of his language, tightly focusing on the all-consuming nature of love (reminding us, along the way, of Nabokov’s Lolita, Stendhal’s On Love and even the Bible’s sensual Song of Songs)." IRINA REYN
Seattle Times
4 of 5 Stars
"Aciman’s prose is alive to each spiral and retraction of feeling, to every signal sent out and withdrawn. The result is a tender-tough story of headlong love and awkward timing that reads like a highbrow cosmopolitan variation on Brokeback Mountain." MICHAEL UPCHURCH
Los Angeles Times
3.5 of 5 Stars
"Aciman’s real theme, as indicated by the novel’s title, is the idea of sexual love as absorption—the act by which all barriers are dissolved and the outside becomes one with the thing desired. … Aciman spends his literary currency on [sexual] descriptions that are over the top and detract from the novel’s more nuanced ideas." JUDITH FREEMAN
Posts
