Zoya Reads

A book that reads like a dizzying spell, lulling you deeper into shifting layers of desire: raw, tender, unresolved. Aciman renders young love as a fever dream, where reason unravels and longing spirals into an all-consuming, morbid obsession, crystallized in seventeen-year-old Elio’s desperate refrain: “You’ll kill me if you stop.” That echo carries through time, rippling into a nostalgic collage of moments, real and imagined, where past and present blur, and ache becomes the sacred thread that stitches memory to meaning. Much like the precocious Elio gazing upon Oliver, the charismatic American scholar who joins his family as a summer guest, we too are swallowed whole by beauty, helpless to resist and forever altered by its touch.

Set in the countryside of northern Italy during the summer of 1983, in a villa framed by apricot trees, the novel is steeped in sensation. It evokes not only the physicality of sex, but also the sweat of languid afternoons, the cool bite of fruit, and the heat of sunlit stone beneath bare feet. Italy is not merely a backdrop but a mood, a magic spell woven from words, a second skin that reflects the characters’ inner states: fragrant, drowsy, and sunstruck. Likewise, the prose does not rush toward climax. It lingers. It inhales. It luxuriates in bike rides, transcribed music, and long hours spent by the pool. It seduces with restraint, as Oliver does, through everything almost said.

Desire in Call Me by Your Name never strides into the open. It coils, flickers, and retreats. In 1980s Italy, queerness found no sanctioned space. It survived in metaphor, in half-spoken phrases, in the space between what is meant and what can be risked. “We can’t talk about those kinds of things,” Oliver says. It is not a rejection but a reflex, protective and rehearsed. In that moment, he draws a boundary between what may exist in daylight and what must stay hidden. His caution speaks not only to personal fear but also to a broader cultural silence that left queer desire without refuge.

“Is it better to speak or to die?” Elio wonders aloud, quoting Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptaméron, a sixteenth-century tale where a lover must choose between voicing desire or perishing in silence. The question lands in the novel like a quiet tremor. It is not rhetorical; it becomes the story’s central wound. In a time when queerness was unspeakable, to speak meant risking everything, but to remain silent was to slowly suffocate, each option a terrible cul-de-sac. Elio inhabits the liminal space of this impossible dilemma; every glance toward Oliver, every hesitant confession, every looping internal monologue becomes a reckoning between vulnerability and self-preservation, a meditation on the unbearable weight of deciding whether to reveal or retreat.

Oliver’s aloofness, his breezy “Later”, and his initial reluctance to linger in moments of vulnerability reflect the tempo of the era. Queer love was viewed as temporary, borrowed, or expendable. His eventual departure and marriage to a woman show how often such love was expected to be outgrown, folded away, or stored in memory. He does not leave because his feelings are untrue, but because he has been taught that some desires are meant to flare briefly and then be buried, even if destined to haunt for a lifetime.

What passes between Elio and Oliver is built not on certainty but on subtext. Their relationship unfolds as much through intellect as through touch. They circle each other in conversations laced with literary, historical, and philosophical references, each exchange a quiet test of knowledge and nerve, steeped in the subtle intimacy of understanding without needing to explain. This meeting of minds becomes a kind of foreplay, as their interactions stretch across endless afternoons and conversations painfully orbit what they dare not name.

Once their relationship culminates in physicality, we watch their dynamic shift. Oliver urges:“Call me by your name and I’ll call you by mine,” alluding to a sacred merging of selves, a secret language that allows them to love without labeling the feeling. It is an utterance that binds them in recognition of their“need, not just to be close together, but to become so totally ductile that each becomes the other.” In a symbolic gesture, they wear each other’s clothes, showcasing how their encounter has been a catalyst for mutual transformation. Elio muses to himself: “To be who I am because of you. To be who he was because of me.”

Ultimately, Call Me by Your Name is a bold, bittersweet love letter to moments of pure intimacy, as Aciman’s writing allows memory to take on the texture of prayer. It is not merely a novel about first love or queer desire; it is about the unbearable beauty of moments that cannot last, and how their significance as such allows them to reverberate long after they are gone. Some encounters, no matter how brief or forbidden, leave marks that time cannot erase, and endure not in declarations, but in the spaces between them.