In the Spotlight: Andre Aciman

[reviews_and_ramblings]

The Book: Call Me by Your Name is the story of a sudden and powerful romance that blossoms between an adolescent boy and a summer guest at his parents’ house, a cliff-side mansion on the Italian Riviera.

Unprepared for the consequences of their attraction, at first each feigns indifference to the other. But during the warm, languorous summer weeks that follow, unrelenting buried currents of obsession and fear, fascination and desire, intensify their passion as they test the charged ground between them. What grows from the depths of their spirits is a romance of scarcely six weeks’ duration and an experience that marks them for a lifetime. For what the two discover on the Riviera and on a sultry evening in Rome is the one thing both already fear they may never truly find again: total intimacy. 

The psychological maneuvers that accompany attraction have seldom been more shrewdly captured as in André Aciman’s frank, unsentimental, heartrending elegy to human passion. Call Me by Your Name is clear-eyed, bare-knuckled, and ultimately unforgettable. 

Amazon: Call Me by Your Name: A Novel

The Author: André Aciman (born January 2, 1951 in Alexandria, Egypt) is an American novelist, essayist, memoirist, and leading scholar of the works of Marcel Proust. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, The Paris Review, as well as in several volumes of The Best American Essays. Aciman is the author of the Whiting Award winning memoir Out of Egypt, an account of his childhood as a secular Jew growing up in Egypt during the 1950s and 1960s. He holds a Ph.D. in comparative literature from Harvard University and currently teaches at the Graduate School and University Center of The City University of New York. He previously taught comparative literature at Princeton University, Bard College, and creative writing at New York University. Among his students at NYU were future authors Nell Freudenberger, Jacob M. Appel and Allison Lynn.

Born André Albert Aciman into a Sephardic Jewish family holding Turkish nationality (his father was originally from Istanbul), Aciman grew up in the cosmopolitan milieu of multilingual Alexandria. The language spoken at home was French, but Italian, Greek, Arabic, and Ladino were also heard and occasionally spoken. Aciman always attended English-language schools, first in Alexandria and later, after his family moved to Italy in 1965, in Rome. In 1969, Aciman's family moved again, this time to New York City, where he attended Lehman College, graduating in 1973.

In addition to his 1996 memoir Out of Egypt, Aciman has published two other books: False Papers (2001), a collection of fourteen essays, and most recently a novel entitled Call Me By Your Name (2007). (From Wikipedia)

Top 100 Gay Novels List (*)

External Link to the Top 100 Gay Novels List (simple - without photos)

External Link to the Top 100 Gay Novels List (wanted - with photos)

*only one title per author, only print books released after January 1, 2000.

Other titles not in the top 100 list:

http://www.librarything.com/catalog/top50MM

Comments

[elisa-rolle.livejournal.com]

Not yet, but it's available into Italian (yeah!!!) and I think it will among my summer read. Elisa

[snowmore.livejournal.com]

Oh! I'm sure you'll review it once you have read it. I look forward to your thoughts. :)

I'm glad it's in Italian. :)

[elisa-rolle.livejournal.com]

yes of course! Elisa