André Aciman: The Meaning and Message of 'Call Me By Your Name'

Author Background and Identity:

• Andre Aciman is the author of Call Me By Your Name (published 2007), which won the Lambda Literary Award for gay fiction and became an Academy Award-winning film.
• Aciman is currently a distinguished professor of comparative literature at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY).
• His family was expelled from Egypt in 1965 and settled in New York in 1968 after a brief period in Italy.
• Aciman holds a multifaceted, conflicted identity: he is an American citizen who previously held Italian citizenship (which he lost upon becoming American) and describes himself as having "many mother tongues" (Italian, French, Arabic) while writing in English.
• His religious identity is similarly fragmented; his father converted to Protestantism for political reasons, leaving Aciman as a "Jewish" person who claims no specific religious practice but identifies with both faiths.

Thematic Elements of Call Me By Your Name:

• Aciman attributes the novel's genesis to a desire to return to the sensory experience of his childhood in Egypt, specifically transposing a beach house to Italy.
• The shift from a heterosexual plot to a same-sex romance occurred after Aciman felt mesmerized by the "newness" of the dynamic and the desire to explore a character who knows his own desires without mystery.
• The narrative was influenced by Aciman's childhood obsession with an older boy at a beach, reimagining a desire for friendship as a desire for a "more passionate" connection.
• The core theme is the "San Clemente syndrome," a concept Aciman developed to describe the impossibility of conflating disparate layers of identity (nationalities, religions, languages) into a single, harmonious whole.
• Aciman explicitly avoided the word "love" in the book, striving instead for a tone of ambiguity, ambivalence, and the "unspoken," believing that the characters' understanding of each other should remain unarticulated to maintain tension.
• The famous father's speech was inspired by Aciman's wish to counter the common parental advice that homosexuality is a phase that will "go away," instead asserting that the experience should not be "killed" or suppressed.

Adaptation to Film and Creative Evolution:

• Aciman described the scene where Elio and Oliver discuss the "things that matter" as the most difficult to write, requiring a balance of profound intimacy and total ambiguity.
• Upon visiting the film set, Aciman observed that the dialogue, which took five to six pages in the book, was condensed into roughly one to two minutes of screen time across multiple takes.
• Director Luca Guadagnino allowed actors significant leeway to improvise the specific wording of the "things that matter" conversation while adhering to the scene's emotional arc.
• Aciman expressed that watching the scene unfold felt like seeing a "gene" from his imagination evolve into a massive production, noting that the spoken ambiguity was as powerful as the written text.

Audience Impact and Personal Reflection:

• Aciman is frequently asked why readers and viewers cry, acknowledging that while he cannot fully replicate the specific personal triggers of others, the novel allows audiences to project their own memories of lost loves and missed connections.
• Aciman draws personal emotional resonance from a specific memory of kissing a woman against a wall in Cambridge, Massachusetts, nearly 40 years prior; he notes that this memory of a "path not taken" still freezes him emotionally today.
• He posits that "nothing dies" in life; even forgotten loves can be reawakened if encountered under the right circumstances, a sentiment that fuels the novel's exploration of lingering nostalgia.
• Aciman notes that the novel serves as a vehicle for "ambivalence," allowing him to avoid taking rigid positions on identity or morality.

The Psychology of Anticipation and Memory:

• Aciman illustrates the concept of "anticipation" through an anecdote about his aunt in Alexandria, who found pleasure in imagining the Seine River while looking at the Mediterranean, only to feel that specific longing vanish upon actually arriving in Paris.
• He concludes that humans often miss a "fabricated image" or a fantasy of a life that never existed, rather than the reality of the present moment.
• This realization that "we miss a part of me that never really existed" informs his writing style, focusing on the tension between what has happened and what "might have happened" or "might still happen."