Book of the week - Call me by your name.

"better to speak or to die"

“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!” “I'm like you,' he said.

Call Me by Your Name holds a piercing and passionate love story coming out through the lives of Elio and Oliver. Calling someone by your own name is certainly love. It’s keeping this love between you two in a special form the world doesn’t need to understand.

This novel by American writer André Aciman came out in 2007; she tells the tale of a blossoming romance between an intellectually precocious and curious 17-year-old American-Italian Jewish boy named Elio Perlman and a visiting 24-year-old American Jewish scholar named Oliver in 1980s Italy. The pages tell you about their summer encounters and the 20 years that followed.

Aciman is very shrewd while he captures the rare combination of psychological maneuvers and attraction; this coming off age book has its peaks and falls as it presents the sudden and powerful love bond. It starts from those restless summer weeks to Oliver and Elio finally coming together just 10 pages before the end. Flowing through unrelenting buried currents of obsession and fear, fascination and desire; that intensifies their passion as they test the pink energy between them.

Those experiences from a scarce romance of 6 weeks left the mark for a lifetime. The fear of not finding total intimacy again and the unison that follows; Call me by your name, serve it all well, in a frank, unsentimental, heartrending fashion.

And yes - (here’s your spoiler) Elio cries out of gratitude as he’s overwhelmed with love in the Peach scene.

Happy reading!