ANDRE ACIMAN
An impressive novel, this love story of Elio and Oliver. Elio is a seventeen year old boy at his parents villa in Italy. Every year his father, a respected literature professor, takes an intern for the summer to help with his papers, work on his own writing, to enliven the discussion in the house and to enjoy the Mediterranean in the summer. This summer the intern was Oliver with impressive literary credential, American movie star looks and charming. The story is narrated by Elio as an adult. Though on the surface a gay novel, both young men have relationships with women. Too much of the story is Elio’s adolescent angst whining about Oliver’s coming and going. Which to me really emphasized the inherent power and age difference between the two. But the the ending of the book is strong which pulls it all together.
“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 this perpetual circulation 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 . . . 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.”
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