How ​‘Call Me by Your Name’ became a queer lit­er­ary phenomenon

The first time I read ​‘Call Me by Your Name’ I stayed up until 4am to fin­ish it, then imme­di­ate­ly start­ed over again. I’d read dozens of queer com­ing-of-age nov­els, dozens of bit­ter­sweet love sto­ries, but noth­ing quite like this – a sto­ry of a once-in-a-life­time love between pre­co­cious 17-year-old Ital­ian Elio and 20-some­thing cock­sure Amer­i­can aca­d­e­m­ic Oliv­er, played out over a brief six week peri­od but recalled over and over for a lifetime.

It felt like the old­est sto­ry ever told and a fresh­ly drawn secret, as though its writer, André Aci­man, had artic­u­lat­ed a col­lec­tive mem­o­ry of long­ing for the very first time. Its beau­ty lay in its diminu­tive moments, in its long, drawn-out descrip­tions of sec­onds-long glances between Elio and Oliv­er. My reac­tion dur­ing that first read­ing was almost more phys­i­cal than intel­lec­tu­al, some­thing more akin to a crush on a per­son, or a the way a heart skips dur­ing a par­tic­u­lar key change in a pop song. It cer­tain­ly wasn’t any­thing I had expe­ri­enced read­ing a book before.

Before its release, Aci­man was known for his non­fic­tion, chron­i­cling his ear­ly life in the 1995 mem­oir ​‘Out of Egypt’, and col­lat­ing crit­i­cism on the work of Mar­cel Proust for the 2001 essay col­lec­tion ​‘The Proust Project’.‘Call Me by Your Name’ is his first nov­el, and it is all the more mirac­u­lous because it seem­ing­ly came from nowhere.

Since its release in 2007, the book has been a slow-burn kind of lit­er­ary sen­sa­tion, gain­ing new fans through enthu­si­as­tic word-of-mouth. Jim Mac­Sweeney, man­ag­er of Gay’s the Word, the UK’s only ded­i­cat­ed LGBT book­shop, has seen the pop­u­lar­i­ty of the book grow from the very begin­ning: ​“We sold a few copies when it first came out, then noticed that peo­ple were com­ing back to buy sec­ond copies for friends,” he tells me. ​“It’s always been an easy book to sell – it’s a love sto­ry, but it’s not sen­ti­men­tal. It cap­tures some­thing that we all feel but that is rare in fic­tion. It’s a real­ly spe­cial book.”

It’s dif­fi­cult to quan­ti­fy what makes the book so spe­cial, what makes it so res­o­nant in a sea of thou­sands and thou­sands of love sto­ries, so much so that it has become a per­son­al tal­is­man for its thou­sands of fans. Sarah Dol­lard, a Lon­don-based screen­writer for Doc­tor Who and Being Human, and a huge fan of CMBYN, describes the first time she read the book: ​“It was less think­ing and more… feel­ing. A lot. Clutch­ing the book to my chest, tear­ful sighs… I read a lot of romance, about half of it queer, and most of it fol­lows a for­mu­la. Not to sniff at for­mu­la – I only read writ­ers who wield it beau­ti­ful­ly. But CMBYN doesn’t do that, it is its own thing. A gor­geous­ly writ­ten gut punch.”

This ten­sion of phys­i­cal­i­ty and emo­tion­al poten­cy came up again and again when I spoke to oth­er fans of the book. When Rachel Huskey, a stu­dent from Texas, first read it, she ​“didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, I just remem­ber lay­ing in bed, star­ing at the ceil­ing, and think­ing about this nov­el for over an hour. That had nev­er hap­pened to me before, it just struck me so harsh­ly in my chest and I didn’t know how to feel. My diary entry from that day says, ​‘I have a fierce desire to con­sume this book and I don’t know how to do it.’”

When I re-read the book last year, spurned on by the announce­ment of the film adap­ta­tion, it was along­side two of my friends who were read­ing it for the first time. We would gath­er in a Twit­ter group chat every day to pore over details of each chap­ter, and – cru­cial­ly – dis­cuss frankly how it revealed inte­gral truths of the pos­si­bil­i­ties of love and desire to us, which felt espe­cial­ly pow­er­ful in the mud­dy con­tem­po­rary midst of casu­al dat­ing and imper­son­al hookup apps.

One of the oth­er par­tic­i­pants in this infor­mal book club, Sophie, recalls how, ​“every one of our inter­pre­ta­tions and reac­tions to this nov­el was valid, vivid, and val­ued. Rec­ol­lec­tions of old loves, missed oppor­tu­ni­ties, the anger and dis­ap­point of our cur­rent stum­bles through the wilds of 2010s dat­ing… This book stripped things from me that I hid from myself, it opened up what I want love – or the idea of love – to be, and how I want my mus­cles to burn as I reach out for it. Like Elio, look­ing back over that sum­mer with each added year of wis­dom and lived expe­ri­ence, each re-read of CMBYN feels like a space to reflect, and hone our own needs through the lens of this one spe­cif­ic romance.”

For all that CMBYN describes com­plex roman­tic and sex­u­al feel­ings that almost every­one can match them­selves up to, it’s also full of the speci­fici­ties of queer expe­ri­ence, refresh­ing­ly removed from the con­straints of a tra­di­tion­al com­ing-out nar­ra­tive. Josh Win­ters, a writer and musi­cian from San Fran­cis­co, recog­nis­es the impor­tance of this for queer read­ers: ​“Many sto­ries about young men com­ing to terms with their sex­u­al­i­ty are con­cerned with how they nav­i­gate the ​“com­ing out” process, usu­al­ly fram­ing it as a required rite of pas­sage (which is it not), but Aci­man is pure­ly inter­est­ed in explor­ing how a young man comes to embrace his desire for anoth­er man removed from any idea of poten­tial sociopo­lit­i­cal impact.” It’s this removal from bla­tant­ly polit­i­cal con­text that is an unspo­ken require­ment of queer nov­els that makes CMBYN so refreshing.

Eoin Dara, a cura­tor based in Dundee, addressed the dual­i­ty of the uni­ver­sal and the specif­i­cal­ly queer in an email to me: ​“The lan­guage of long­ing and desire and uncer­tain­ty could be about any blos­som­ing love affair, it’s pret­ty expan­sive and uni­ver­sal. But then in oth­er ways, it’s so inex­plic­a­bly caught up in the invis­i­ble pol­i­tics of queer desire; the pol­i­tics of look­ing. I love how it focus­es detail so minute­ly on eye con­tact in parts: Some­thing that’s so cen­tral to queer com­mu­ni­ca­tion – silent, unspo­ken under­stand­ings and mes­sages that bounce around pub­lic space and crowd­ed rooms full of obliv­i­ous straights.”

There’s noth­ing more anx­i­ety-induc­ing than the antic­i­pa­tion of a new ver­sion of some­thing you love so, so much – espe­cial­ly if its whole worth and mag­ic lies in its atmos­pher­ics and cod­ed glances; the most dif­fi­cult things to trans­late to film. It’s these ephemer­al details that are most antic­i­pat­ed among fans of the book. ​“There’s a lot of small things about the sto­ry that are what give the big scenes their val­ue,” says Rachel. ​“The foot­sie, the touch dur­ing vol­ley­ball… it’s about them being so syn­di­cat­ed with each oth­er that they don’t hide any­thing anymore.”

Jim echoes this sen­ti­ment: ​“Not that much hap­pens in the book: It’s about ten­sion, desire, long­ing, rather than big events. I last read it 10 years ago and I don’t even remem­ber the char­ac­ter names, but what I do remem­ber is how Aci­man cap­tures that feel­ing of being aware of anoth­er per­son in a room, and that being all that mat­ters. And I’m inter­est­ed to see how that is trans­lat­ed in the film.” When asked about see­ing the film, Eoin con­fess­es that ​“I’m so ner­vous about see­ing it. I hope the script is sparse, I hope the looks are long.”

In Feb­ru­ary this year, I queued up out­side a cin­e­ma at the Berli­nale, shak­ing equal parts with late-win­ter cold and with nerves about see­ing Call Me by Your Name for the first time. I shared the same con­cerns as oth­er fans of the book: This was such a pre­cious thing, I felt like I owned it to an extent – how could I trust any­one else to under­stand it so ful­ly, to feel it so com­plete­ly? But the film was won­der­ful, lack­ing some of the spe­cif­ic nar­ra­tive details of the book but so rich with what was real­ly impor­tant: the feel­ing, the atmos­phere, the intan­gi­bil­i­ty. It is per­fect­ly cast and per­fect­ly paced. I wept solid­ly for the last 45 min­utes, feel­ing slight­ly embar­rassed when the lights came up and the rush of real­i­ty set back in.

There must have been a thou­sand peo­ple in the packed-out cin­e­ma, but it still felt like mine. ​“Now that the trail­ers are out and the press is being done in the lead up to the film’s release, it does feel a bit like when your lit­tle secret band makes it big,” says Sophie. ​“But now that it’s more wide­spread, I still don’t have a desire to dis­cuss it beyond my lit­tle group. I am much more ful­filled to pass an image of farmer’s mar­ket peach­es, or buy an excep­tion­al­ly loose and wind-swept shirt to keep CMBYN present and tan­gi­ble out­side of the page.”

As more and more peo­ple are drawn to the book through the film release, and through passed-on copies, word-of-mouth rec­om­men­da­tions and infor­mal book clubs like ours, its pages will still be there for me – for all of us – as an inti­mate, per­son­al com­fort, to be read and felt until ear­ly in the morn­ing for years to come.