Golden shadows of things past

Elio passes the long, languid days of a Mediterranean summer with his family at their large vacation home on the Italian Riviera. As the days go by, Elio sits beside the pool, transcribing Haydn sonatas. He plays tennis. He swims in the ocean, bikes to the nearest village where he haunts his favorite bookstore, lies in the Mediterranean sun. He carries on a desultory summer affair with a nice local girl.

Elio is 17. He is Italian, secularly Jewish, son of a respected professor, precociously well-read, musically talented, entirely fluent in both English and Italian and conversant in French, German and ancient Greek. He loves his family. His summer days pass like a dream, a golden idyll.

Each year, his father invites a graduate student to live with the family for six weeks. The professor helps the student with his writing and in exchange, the student provides some assistance to his host in his own research. Oliver thus drops into the family's life from Columbia University -- a 24-year-old philosophy student who is editing for publication his study of the philosophy of Heraclitus. Oliver is brilliant, intellectually accomplished, charismatic, funny, also Jewish -- and very American. The entire family is charmed by his personality, and by his American persona.

And Elio? From the first instant, Elio is in love.

Call Me by Your Name, by André Aciman, is on its surface a summer romance; a coming out story; a tale of a father and son, both highly intelligent, set in an Italian small town; a nostalgia for lost youth -- it is all of these, and all of these done superbly. Aciman writes beautifully, evoking the sights, sounds and smells of summer on the Italian coast. He brings to life the shyness, the hopes, the hopelessness, the misunderstandings, the misreading of signs, and -- ultimately -- the joy and passion of two young people strongly attracted to each other who struggle to understand their own feelings and those of each other.

Aciman, interestingly enough, has edited a collection of essays about the writings of Marcel Proust, so maybe it's not surprising that there's a Proustian atmosphere surrounding Call Me by Your Name -- a remembrance of times past in its own right. Elio leisurely, meticulously and in great physical and emotional detail tells us his story, painting a verbal picture of his six weeks of yearning and magic during the summer that he and Oliver lived in adjoining rooms, and of his devastation when summer ends and Oliver returns to his studies in New York.

More or less subtextually, moreover, Aciman seems to contemplate and mull over a dull sorrow that lies across most of our lives, the sense of early opportunities ignored or rejected or perhaps believed not realistically available. In the final chapter, Oliver and Elio meet twice as adults, 15 years and again 20 years following their summer together. Both are now highly successful in their respective fields. Oliver is happily married with two children; Elio has had reasonably successful relationships with a number of other men. But both look back on their Italian summer together as -- in its own way -- the defining and most intimate relationship of their lives. Not that there can now be any going back. As Elio says, after fifteen years, too much water has flowed under the bridge.

By the end of that summer, Elio's father had intuited the relationship between Oliver and his son. After Oliver had returned to New York, he saw his son suffering. He gently told Elio to let himself feel his suffering -- not to deaden it or harden himself against it.

"... if there is pain, nurse it, and if there is a flame, don't snuff it out, don't be brutal with it. ... 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!"

Both the joy and the loss were now part of Elio's life. Both should be remembered and valued.

When they last meet, as middle-aged men, Oliver suggests to Elio that we all live a number of parallel lives -- one of them a "real" life, and the others potential lives that would themselves have been "real" if different choices had been made. Oliver is happy with his own family. He also would have been happy -- perhaps happier? -- spending a lifetime with Elio, but that potential alternative life -- that life that never became "real," and that can never become "real" now -- still exists within him and still adds richness to his present life.

Only, perhaps, by incorporating these potential lives, and accepting them as part of our total being and personality, as a part of the story of our lives that we tell to ourselves to make sense of our own existence, can we escape the otherwise necessary sorrow that life often forces on us -- our constant need to make choices and, in so doing, to sacrifice many good alternatives in order to achieve others that we believe are better.