I cannot stop talking about André Aciman's Call Me By Your Name. It's one of those books that I actually mourn having read because all I really want is to go back in time and be a virgin to this spectacular love story again. I felt like I rushed it, much like a first time, racing breathless to the ending without knowing that it would be over far too soon. Read this book. If you're reading this post and you haven't read this book and you don't own it yet, stop what you're doing (I won't be offended in the least) and go buy it. I'm not even sure how to begin to describe this book for those of you living under a rock who haven't heard of the Oscar-nominated film based on it. It's an injustice to simply label it as a "coming-of-age" piece, just as it is an injustice to call it a "universal love story", I hate both of those references but I loved this book and I read it in gulps at first and then in teeny tiny sips towards the end. Set during one hot summer on the Ligurian coast, Call Me By Your Name tells the tale of a bilingual, bicultural teenager, Elio, as he grapples with the laws of attraction in a sleepy Italian town upon the arrival of an annual summer student. The writing is well-suited to the setting, it’s drawn-out and languorous, much like the Italian summers that I know too well. The smattering of the two languages, Italian and English, here and there make this book feel like it was written just for me.
“Everyone goes through a period of Traviamento - when we take, say, a different turn in life, the other via. Dante himself did. Some recover, some pretend to recover, some never come back, some chicken out before even starting, and some, for fear of taking any turns, find themselves leading the wrong life all life long.”
As a learning strategy, I often try to have at least one book in Italian on the go at any given time. During this last month, while reading Call Me By Your Name, my Italian book was slightly more light-hearted: Tutte Le Volte Che Ho Scritto Ti Amo (To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before) by Jenny Han. A teen romance not to be underrated, it would make for fantastic beach reading if you’re already planning your summer vacation. Lara Jean is sixteen and navigating her first loves with tact and prose by swooning and falling and then forgetting about all the boys she’s loved by writing them a sort of goodbye letter which she places into a hat box and promptly forgets about. That is, until somehow the letters get mailed to all those boys by accident and her tranquil existence is turned upside-down. While this book lacks the intensity of Call Me By Your Name, Lara Jean is two years younger than the former’s protagonist, Elio, and it’s reasonable to read about her first kisses with a touch more innocence than you’ll encounter in my first recommendation. She speaks, however, in wise ways with regards to her mother’s death and Han manages to inject wisdom beyond her sixteen years in passages such as this one:
“When someone's been gone a long time, at first you save up all the things you want to tell them. You try to keep track of everything in your head. But it's like trying to hold on to a fistful of sand: all the little bits slip out of your hands, and then you're just clutching air and grit. That's why you can't save it all up like that. Because by the time you finally see each other, you're catching up only on the big things, because it's too much bother to tell about the little things. But the little things are what make up life.”
The third book I’ve read is the book that some say brought Joan Didion to the living rooms of the masses, including myself. Despite the fact that Didion is a true and undisputed American literary legend, her earlier work and journalism pieces flew by the wayside for so many of us born into the era of the Kindle. The Year of Magical Thinking chronicles the year following the unexpected and sudden death of her husband, John Dunne, the other half of America’s most beloved literary couple who made a name for themselves on both the East and West Coast of the country as writers and screenwriters. They essentially lived the dream and shared a partnership that seems to exist only in fiction novels that they never penned themselves. They were too realistic to do that. Didion was preparing dinner for her husband when he went into cardiac arrest while on his second whisky of the night. What comes after is a stunning recollection of Didion’s trudge through the deepest depths of that year, a marked portrayal of grief. Immersed in it, in her continual thoughts about Dunne, the replaying of the events leading up to his death, the “what ifs”, the scripting of the parallel life we all wish we had access to, she becomes you or me, she becomes all of us as we face the experience of mortality. An experience that I have of recent, taken a crash course in and therefore found immense comfort in Didion’s words on paper:
“We are not idealized wild things. We are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. As we were. As we are no longer. As we will one day not be at all.”
Would love to know if any of you have read these and what your opinions were of them. Let me know in the comments as well as what your "Recommended Read" is at the moment. Happy reading! xo
“Everyone goes through a period of Traviamento - when we take, say, a different turn in life, the other via. Dante himself did. Some recover, some pretend to recover, some never come back, some chicken out before even starting, and some, for fear of taking any turns, find themselves leading the wrong life all life long.”
As a learning strategy, I often try to have at least one book in Italian on the go at any given time. During this last month, while reading Call Me By Your Name, my Italian book was slightly more light-hearted: Tutte Le Volte Che Ho Scritto Ti Amo (To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before) by Jenny Han. A teen romance not to be underrated, it would make for fantastic beach reading if you’re already planning your summer vacation. Lara Jean is sixteen and navigating her first loves with tact and prose by swooning and falling and then forgetting about all the boys she’s loved by writing them a sort of goodbye letter which she places into a hat box and promptly forgets about. That is, until somehow the letters get mailed to all those boys by accident and her tranquil existence is turned upside-down. While this book lacks the intensity of Call Me By Your Name, Lara Jean is two years younger than the former’s protagonist, Elio, and it’s reasonable to read about her first kisses with a touch more innocence than you’ll encounter in my first recommendation. She speaks, however, in wise ways with regards to her mother’s death and Han manages to inject wisdom beyond her sixteen years in passages such as this one:
“When someone's been gone a long time, at first you save up all the things you want to tell them. You try to keep track of everything in your head. But it's like trying to hold on to a fistful of sand: all the little bits slip out of your hands, and then you're just clutching air and grit. That's why you can't save it all up like that. Because by the time you finally see each other, you're catching up only on the big things, because it's too much bother to tell about the little things. But the little things are what make up life.”
The third book I’ve read is the book that some say brought Joan Didion to the living rooms of the masses, including myself. Despite the fact that Didion is a true and undisputed American literary legend, her earlier work and journalism pieces flew by the wayside for so many of us born into the era of the Kindle. The Year of Magical Thinking chronicles the year following the unexpected and sudden death of her husband, John Dunne, the other half of America’s most beloved literary couple who made a name for themselves on both the East and West Coast of the country as writers and screenwriters. They essentially lived the dream and shared a partnership that seems to exist only in fiction novels that they never penned themselves. They were too realistic to do that. Didion was preparing dinner for her husband when he went into cardiac arrest while on his second whisky of the night. What comes after is a stunning recollection of Didion’s trudge through the deepest depths of that year, a marked portrayal of grief. Immersed in it, in her continual thoughts about Dunne, the replaying of the events leading up to his death, the “what ifs”, the scripting of the parallel life we all wish we had access to, she becomes you or me, she becomes all of us as we face the experience of mortality. An experience that I have of recent, taken a crash course in and therefore found immense comfort in Didion’s words on paper:
“We are not idealized wild things. We are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. As we were. As we are no longer. As we will one day not be at all.”
Would love to know if any of you have read these and what your opinions were of them. Let me know in the comments as well as what your "Recommended Read" is at the moment. Happy reading! xo
If you enjoyed this post, you may also like to "dare un'occhiata" at these ones:
Recommended Reads: Month of October
Recommended Reads: The Best of Us by Joyce Maynard
Recommended Reads: Come Away With Me by Karma Brown
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