First, a couple of disclaimers: I did not in fact read this entire book. I skipped the whole first section, because I had less than no interest in reading about Elio's dad finding love with a younger woman and having a child with her and any of that nonsense. I also read this book with an extreme level of detachment from it; while it is an actual official sequel to Call Me By Your Name written by the same author, I went into it determined to essentially treat it like I would any bit of fanfic, and certainly not necessarily my canon.
That second disclaimer was really important, because woo boy! This certainly is a book about characters who share the same names as the two main characters in CMBYN, and the breathless narrative voice matches or at least approximates the point of view in the original novel. But the question I kept asking myself over and over again was what the point of this sequel was. We encounter Elio again ten or fifteen years after the summer he spent with Oliver, and he is still lost amidst a romance with a much, much older man (the significance of the age difference is commented upon so many times it lost all meaning). And then the story loses the plot completely when it turns into a mystery about a Jewish musician lost to WWII and a song that was a confession of love hidden within a Jewish melody, and apparently this is a universe in which every single character's father had a great gay love, and now Elio's second significant lover also has a gay Jewish lover of his own, and Elio is still just pining for Oliver, and it is a mess.
The next section involves Oliver's life in academia, and specifically at Columbia in the mid-2000s when it was still just barely possible to have the sort of celebrated and financially rewarded life as a professor that post-war novels of the twentieth century were all obsessed with. He is also, of course, in a bizarre and typically loveless marriage, while also attempting to seduce a gay male friend and a straight female friend, but he too cannot manage to leave Elio behind.
These two vignettes about their lives aren't what I wish to imagine for these two characters post-CMBYN, but there is something at least recognizable about the depictions: you can see the progression of their lives, how they each could have gotten there from that summer, and you could even see how their memory of that summer could not possibly match the actual experience of it. If this was a novel about the formative relationships of our teens and early twenties never truly resembling our memories of them, that would be one thing. It wouldn't necessarily be the narrative thread I am most interested in following in my fiction, but I could at least understand it.
Instead, the final section of this (quite short) book reunites them in Italy, at Elio's parents' home (that now belongs only to his mother, following his father's death), showing that they in fact can go home again, apparently. It is the least earned and most perplexing end to this book and this overall narrative that I can imagine; nothing is rooted in any kind of reality, which is even more disappointing given that one of the true joys of CMBYN is how it reads like both a dream, completely ephemeral, all atmosphere and the memory of how a place and time smelled and tasted and felt, while also being utterly grounded in the physical realities of life, sometimes painfully so. It was only ever Elio's experience of events, which made them that much more concrete; there were no other perspectives to hide in, ever. The sequel gives us the worst kind of wish fulfillment, a fantasy of their life together in Italy, forever on vacation, adults playing at the memories of their youth while ignoring their real life children, among other responsibilities. And if that wasn't ghastly enough, the specter of Elio's half-brother, the inevitable result of his father's affair with a woman Elio's own age, a little boy named Oliver, truly puts the story over the top. The prose is still fluid and breathless, but the story leads you down a path of genuine nonsense.
Grade: C (but only because of approximately three passages from the Elio POV that still managed to take my breath away)
That second disclaimer was really important, because woo boy! This certainly is a book about characters who share the same names as the two main characters in CMBYN, and the breathless narrative voice matches or at least approximates the point of view in the original novel. But the question I kept asking myself over and over again was what the point of this sequel was. We encounter Elio again ten or fifteen years after the summer he spent with Oliver, and he is still lost amidst a romance with a much, much older man (the significance of the age difference is commented upon so many times it lost all meaning). And then the story loses the plot completely when it turns into a mystery about a Jewish musician lost to WWII and a song that was a confession of love hidden within a Jewish melody, and apparently this is a universe in which every single character's father had a great gay love, and now Elio's second significant lover also has a gay Jewish lover of his own, and Elio is still just pining for Oliver, and it is a mess.
The next section involves Oliver's life in academia, and specifically at Columbia in the mid-2000s when it was still just barely possible to have the sort of celebrated and financially rewarded life as a professor that post-war novels of the twentieth century were all obsessed with. He is also, of course, in a bizarre and typically loveless marriage, while also attempting to seduce a gay male friend and a straight female friend, but he too cannot manage to leave Elio behind.
These two vignettes about their lives aren't what I wish to imagine for these two characters post-CMBYN, but there is something at least recognizable about the depictions: you can see the progression of their lives, how they each could have gotten there from that summer, and you could even see how their memory of that summer could not possibly match the actual experience of it. If this was a novel about the formative relationships of our teens and early twenties never truly resembling our memories of them, that would be one thing. It wouldn't necessarily be the narrative thread I am most interested in following in my fiction, but I could at least understand it.
Instead, the final section of this (quite short) book reunites them in Italy, at Elio's parents' home (that now belongs only to his mother, following his father's death), showing that they in fact can go home again, apparently. It is the least earned and most perplexing end to this book and this overall narrative that I can imagine; nothing is rooted in any kind of reality, which is even more disappointing given that one of the true joys of CMBYN is how it reads like both a dream, completely ephemeral, all atmosphere and the memory of how a place and time smelled and tasted and felt, while also being utterly grounded in the physical realities of life, sometimes painfully so. It was only ever Elio's experience of events, which made them that much more concrete; there were no other perspectives to hide in, ever. The sequel gives us the worst kind of wish fulfillment, a fantasy of their life together in Italy, forever on vacation, adults playing at the memories of their youth while ignoring their real life children, among other responsibilities. And if that wasn't ghastly enough, the specter of Elio's half-brother, the inevitable result of his father's affair with a woman Elio's own age, a little boy named Oliver, truly puts the story over the top. The prose is still fluid and breathless, but the story leads you down a path of genuine nonsense.
Grade: C (but only because of approximately three passages from the Elio POV that still managed to take my breath away)
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