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Highlyeccentric

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Highlyeccentric is Currently Reading

Highlyeccentric is currently reading

The Summer Book

by Tove Jansson

bookshelves: currently-reading

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Apr 03, 2026 12:00AM

Highlyeccentric is currently reading

Call Me By Your Name (Call Me By Your Name, #1)

by André Aciman (Goodreads Author)

bookshelves: fiction-for-fun, currently-reading

Reading for the 2nd time

read in March 2019

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Highlyeccentric said: " This book utterly blew me away. Aciman does fantastic work with language, wrapping sentences around affective experiences that elude most ordinary expressions. The end result isn't comfortable, not by far: desire, here, is intoxicating and devastatin This book utterly blew me away. Aciman does fantastic work with language, wrapping sentences around affective experiences that elude most ordinary expressions. The end result isn't comfortable, not by far: desire, here, is intoxicating and devastating, fascinating and repulsive all at once. There are experiences here that I recognise as my own - nothing so structurally simple as 'relationship with significant age/power disparity', I mean experience on the level of emotion, affect, self-structuring and restructuring - and had not expected to ever see pinned down like this.

What bothers me is the combination of the chronological setting and the epilogue. The main action takes place in 1987; the final chapter spools rapidly through Elio's life and two further encounters with Oliver over twenty years. Yet, aside from one glancing reference to a necessarily uncomfortable health discussion AIDS is never mentioned.

Oh, I can buy that Oliver wouldn't mention it in 1987: he's clearly so far in denial he's swimming with the crocodiles. But I find it hard to believe it made no impact on Elio. The narration is, while very tightly focalised through 17-y-old Elio's experience, *voiced* by his older self, including not infrequent commentary on his youthful actions from the perspective of what it would mean later. I find it extremely difficult to believe that he looks back on an affair like that and *doesn't* think 'holy shit we were reckless'. And are we to believe Elio did not go on to have further relationships with men? The final chapter mentions 'people' after Oliver, suddenly coy about gender. And those people come and go, apparently, Elio loves and learns and... the great scourge of the LGBTQ community of the 80s and 90s just doesn't figure into anything for him. Nor does he consider that as a possible factfor Oliver, despite the fact that the life Oliver is living - married, with kids, perfectly normal life, and a secret past (present?) of affairs with men - is a textbook example of exactly what the 80s and 90s feared from bi and/or closeted gay men.

I feel like, having told a story that's very much a physically and psychologically grounded narrative of formative queer passion, Aciman took a step back and decided to massage it into a story that 'isn't defined by gender' or something. And that's where I think it shows through that Aciman isn't himself queer.or ...more "

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"Twenty something pages in and I’m just... utterly swept by the language and affect" — Feb 25, 2019 01:53PM

Mar 21, 2019 02:01PM · see review