Call Me By Your Name (André Aciman)

Author: André Aciman
Published: 2007
Pages: 248
Project: Identity – sexual

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Call Me by Your Name follows a powerful summer romance between an adolescent boy and a summer guest at his family’s Italian mansion. Initially feigning indifference, their buried desires and fears intensify over six weeks, leading to a deep emotional connection. Their experiences on the Riviera and a sultry evening in Rome reveal a longing for total intimacy that profoundly impacts their lives.

Complexity

CEFR: B2
Plot Complexity: moderate
Language Complexity: moderate
Ideas Complexity: moderate

Blurb

Call Me by Your Name is the story of a sudden and powerful romance that blossoms between an adolescent boy and a summer guest at his parents’ cliff-side mansion on the Italian Riviera. Unprepared for the consequences of their attraction, at first each feigns indifference. But during the restless summer weeks that follow, unrelenting buried currents of obsession and fear, fascination and desire, intensify their passion as they test the charged ground between them. What grows from the depths of their spirits is a romance of scarcely six weeks’ duration and an experience that marks them for a lifetime. For what the two discover on the Riviera and during a sultry evening in Rome is the one thing both already fear they may never truly find again: total intimacy.

The psychological maneuvers that accompany attraction have seldom been more shrewdly captured than in André Aciman’s frank, unsentimental, heartrending elegy to human passion. Call Me by Your Name is clear-eyed, bare-knuckled, and ultimately unforgettable.

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