Blurb:
During a restless summer on the Italian Riviera, a powerful romance blooms between seventeen-year-old Elio and his father’s house guest, Oliver. Unrelenting currents of obsession and fear, fascination and desire threaten to overwhelm the lovers who at first feign indifference to the charge between them. What grows from the depths of their souls is a romance of scarcely six weeks’ duration, and an experience that marks them for a lifetime. For what the two discover on the Riviera and during a sultry evening in Rome is the one thing they both already fear they may never truly find again: total intimacy.
Rating: 4/5 stars
Side Notes:
- Tropes: LGBTQ+ Romance, Coming of Age
- YA Fiction
- Recommended for older readers (16 years and up)
- A very poetic and beautiful book
- The author’s writing style reminds me of my own writing style
- Very descriptive
- Trigger Warning: Age gap (adult/minor), Homophobia (internalised), Racism, Self-harm (mentioned), and Statutory rape (graphic)
Book Quotes:
- “And on that evening when we grow older still we’ll speak about these two young men as though they were two strangers we met on the train and whom we admire and want to help along. And we’ll want to call it envy, because to call it regret would break our hearts.”
- “I had never been able to admit to myself how happy Oliver had made me the day he’d swallowed my peach. Of course, it had moved me, but it had flattered me as well”
- “If there is any truth in the world, it lies when I’m with you, and if I find the courage to speak my truth to you one day, remind me to light a candle in thanksgiving at every altar in Rome.”
- “I suddenly realised that we were on borrowed time, that time is always borrowed, and that the lending agency exacts its premium precisely when we are least prepared to pay and need to borrow more.”
- “I believe with every cell in my body that every cell in yours must not, must never, die, and if it does have to die, let it die inside my body.”
- “He came. He left. Nothing else had changed. I had not changed. The world hadn’t changed. Yet nothing would be the same. All that remains is dream making and strange remembrance.”
- “Smells and sounds I’d grown up with and known every year of my life until then but that had suddenly turned on me and acquired an inflection forever coloured by the events of that summer.”
- “Perhaps we were friends first and lovers second. But then perhaps this is what lovers are.”
- “Something that was mine was in his mouth, more his than mine now. I don’t know what happened to me at that moment as I kept staring at him, but suddenly, I had a fierce urge to cry. And rather than fight it, as with orgasm, I simply let myself go, if only to show him something equally private about me as well.”
- “Whatever happens between us, Elio, I just want you to know. Don’t ever say you didn’t know.”
- “I may have come close, but I never had what you had. Something always held me back or stood in the way. How you live your life is your business. But remember, our hearts and our bodies are given to us only once.”
- “Time makes us sentimental. Perhaps, in the end, it is because of time that we suffer.”
- “But there’s only one, and before you know it, your heart is worn out, and, as for your body, there comes a point when no one looks at it, much less wants to come near it. Right now there’s sorrow. I don’t envy the pain.”
- “When you’re just ready to shut the door of the taxi and have already said goodbye to everyone else and there’s not a thing left to say in this life, then, just this once, turn to me, even in jest, or as an afterthought, which would have meant everything to me when we were together, and, as you did back then, look me in the face, hold my gaze, and call me by your name.”
- “We rip out so much of ourselves to be cured of things faster than we should that we go bankrupt by the age of thirty and have less to offer each time we start with someone new. But to feel nothing so as not to feel anything—what a waste!”
- “I reached for him and muffled my sobs against his shoulder. I was crying because no stranger had ever been so kind or gone so far for me….I was crying because I’d never known so much gratitude and there was no other way to show it.”
- “We belonged to each other, but had lived so far apart that we belonged to others now.”
- “I watched him put the peach in his mouth and slowly begin to eat it, staring at me so intensely that I thought even lovemaking didn’t go so far…I could tell he was tasting it at that very instant.”
- “We had the stars, you and I. And this is given once only.”
- “Most of us can’t help but live as though we’ve got two lives to live, one is the mockup, the other the finished version, and then there are all those versions in between. But there’s only one, and before you know it, your heart is worn out, and, as for your body, there comes a point when no one looks at it, much less wants to come near it. Right now there’s sorrow. I don’t envy the pain. But I envy you the pain. ”
- “I’m like you,’ he said. ‘I remember everything.’ I stopped for a second. If you remember everything, I wanted to say, and if you are really like me, then before you leave tomorrow, or when you’re just ready to shut the door of the taxi and have already said goodbye to everyone else and there’s not a thing left to say in this life, then, just this once, turn to me, even in jest, or as an afterthought, which would have meant everything to me when we were together, and, as you did back then, look me in the face, hold my gaze, and call me by your name”
- “People who read are hiders. They hide who they are. People who hide don’t always like who they are.”
- “If I could have him like this in my dreams every night of my life, I’d stake my entire life on dreams and be done with the rest.”
- “We are not written for one instrument alone; I am not, neither are you.”
- “Maybe it was the alcohol, maybe it was the truth, maybe I didn’t want things to turn abstract, but I felt I should say it, because this was the moment to say it, because it suddenly dawned on me that this was why I had come, to tell him ‘You are the only person I’d like to say goodbye to when I die, because only then will this thing I call my life make any sense. And if I should hear that you died, my life as I know it, the me who is speaking with you now, will cease to exist.”
- “Twenty years was yesterday, and yesterday was just earlier this morning, and morning seemed light-years away.”
- “Everyone goes through a period of Traviamento – when we take, say, a different turn in life, the other via. Dante himself did. Some recover, some pretend to recover, some never come back, some chicken out before even starting, and some, for fear of taking any turns, find themselves leading the wrong life all life long.”
- “If he knew, if he only knew that I was giving him every chance to put two and two together and come up with a number bigger than infinity.”
- “Fear not. It will come. At least I hope it does. And when you least expect it. Nature has cunning ways of finding our weakest spot.”