“I didn’t want to consummate their love,” Aciman told me when I visited him at the sparsely decorated but spacious Upper West Side apartment where he has lived with his wife for three decades. Or that maybe he’d go back to the United States. These references were meant to foreshadow that Oliver would drown. As Aciman unspooled the 17-year-old Elio’s inner monologue of desire for the handsome intruder down the hall, he implanted references to the writer Percy Shelley’s 1822 death off the Italian coast. It then mutated again so that the object of obsession became a man: Oliver, a swaggering American grad student on a summer residency. Along the way, it mutated into a tale about a boy lusting after a woman at his family’s villa. Their love story was almost a death story.Īciman’s novel began as a writing exercise about the author’s plans for a visit to Italy. E lio and Oliver, the lovers at the center of André Aciman’s 2007 novel, Call Me by Your Name, and its 2017 Oscar-winning film adaptation, have a claim to enjoying one of the most cherished gay trysts in all of modern fiction.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |