André Aciman is doing a book tour eleven years after publishing Call Me By Your Name. On February 20, 2018 he stopped in at the American Writers Museum in Chicago.
by: Renée Stock
On adaptations: While film adaptations are rarely as good as the books they are based on, Call Me By Your Name is a rare exception. Like the lovers in the book, the novel and the film are not rivals, but perfect companions—each formed from entirely different raw materials, but sharing the same atoms at their core. Both are forensic examinations of the small moments between the big moments of life, but how they each carry out those examinations is vastly different. It was thrilling to be able to sit and listen to André Aciman read from his book and then hear his thoughts about the film that resulted.
He began the evening by reading from a passage that he said was the most difficult for him to write. It is a confessional scene where the protagonist Elio, a seventeen-year-old boy, finds the courage to speak about his desire. The object of his desire is Oliver, the twenty-four-year-old graduate student, who is living with his family in Italy for the summer. Elio’s words are a test balloon sent out in an attempt to prove his flimsy hypothesis that if he feels something so strongly for Oliver, Oliver must also feel something in return. It is a brave and bold move for someone so young, but Aciman wanted to write about someone who took action and went after what they wanted.
The film is directed by the astonishing Italian filmmaker, Luca Guadagnino. Guadagnino mentioned to Aciman that the scene in question in the book goes on for pages and pages and he would need to find a way to compress the text. As Aciman sees it, directors essentially have two tools they can use to distill long passages down to their essence. One is through voice-over, which can feel heavy-handed and rarely accomplishes anything interesting. The other is to have a great actor take all of the information off the pages and put it on his face. That is exactly what Timothée Chalamet did in that scene, and what takes many minutes to read in the novel takes two minutes of film. You can watch the scene here, while listening to Guadagnino discuss the incredible amount of thought that went into filming those precious two minutes. For Aciman, that is the genius of cinema, and his feelings for the film can be boiled down to this: “It’s not an adaptation. It does on film what a book cannot do. To recognize that each modality has its own strengths that the other cannot even imitate… that’s fine. I’m good with that.”
On desire: Aciman talked about some words that were specifically omitted from the book, like love and gay. He explains their omission this way: “I wanted to write a novel that was extremely fluid. I wanted it to be the most perfect relationship that two individuals can have.” The only secret he was concerned about was the secret he himself has lived with all his life. “The secret of desire.” When you desire someone else you are automatically inhibited. You might tell your friends about your desire, but you never tell the object. Exploring that internal conflict became the basis for the novel.
On inspiration: La Princesse de Clèves, a French novel written in 1678, is a book that no one reads, but everyone should. It was a big influence on Call Me By Your Name.
On the title: It was not the first title and the whole idea started as a joke. He knew a couple with very similar names. Do they call each other by the other’s name, he wondered to himself? But as the idea of identity switching became a vital theme of the story, so the title was born.
On the structure of the novel: The book is divided into four parts. The Basilica of San Clemente has four levels. Identity works like layers of a building. It’s interesting, but he doesn’t want anyone to write a dissertation about it.
On time: “Time is a criminal in our lives.”
On peaches: He knows what you’re wondering. And, no, he hasn’t. But he does highly recommend eating a peach in Italy in the middle of the summer. (That sounds like excellent advice.)
On a personal note: As a writer myself, I know it takes courage to write a book like Call Me By Your Name. Not because of the subject matter, but because it is impossible to read it and not understand how it exposes some very personal parts of the person writing it. I am grateful for his courage because I have fallen hard for books before in my life, but never quite like this. For some reason I felt embarrassed to tell him how much his book meant to me, but while waiting in line for him to sign it, I, like Elio, decided it was better to speak. And it was.