Tag: Read

Book Review: Call Me By Your Name by André Aciman

whatcathyreadnext

Call Me By Your NameAbout the Book

The story of a sudden and powerful romance that blooms between seventeen-year-old Elio and his father’s house guest Oliver during a restless summer on the Italian Riviera.

It tells how unrelenting currents of obsession and fear, fascination and desire threaten to overwhelm the lovers who at first feign indifference to the charge between them.

Format: eBook, paperback (248 pp.) Publisher: Atlantic Books
Published:  1st April 2009                    Genre: Fiction

Purchase Links*
Amazon.co.uk  ǀ  Amazon.com
*links provided for convenience, not as part of any affiliate programme

Find Call Me By Your Name on Goodreads

My Review

Call Me By Your Name forms part of my From Page to Screen reading project. I shall be publishing my comparison of the book and the film in due course.  In the meantime, you can read Andre Aciman’s own thoughts about the process of adaptation here.

The book is a study of sexual exploration and of the doubts and uncertainties that characterize the early stages of a relationship. Not knowing what to say, saying the wrong thing, saying nothing… Trying to interpret another’s feelings from gestures, glances or small actions… Moving from despair to elation in response to any small sign of returned affection… Struggling with the complexity of your own feelings just as much as those of the other party. All these sensations the author describes in intricate detail as the reader wonders and agonizes along with Elio.

Elio and his family seem to live a privileged and rarified existence, rather remote from the local community. Days are spent swimming, playing tennis or sunbathing.  Mealtime conversations encompass history, philosophy, music, books. Although set on the Italian Riviera, I only really got a sense of the atmosphere of Italy when the action moves to Rome later in the book. That section was lively and playful and I really felt Elio’s and Oliver’s joy in each other’s company and in that vibrant city.

Call Me By Your Name is beautifully written and conjures up all the emotional turmoil of young love and awakening sexuality. For me, in the end though, there was just a little too much introspection and adolescent angst. However, I’m very much looking forward to seeing the award-winning film adaptation which I think may address some of the shortcomings I found in the book.

Follow my blog with Bloglovin

In three words: Emotional, intimate, introspective

Try something similar…Mussolini’s Island by Sarah Day (click here to read my review)

Andre AcimanAbout the Author

André Aciman was born in Alexandria, Egypt and is an American memoirist, essayist, novelist, and scholar of seventeenth-century literature. He has also written many essays and reviews on Marcel Proust. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, The Paris Review, The New Republic, Condé Nast Traveler as well as in many volumes of The Best American Essays. Aciman received his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Harvard University, has taught at Princeton and Bard and is Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature at The CUNY Graduate Center. He is currently chair of the Ph. D. Program in Comparative Literature and founder and director of The Writers’ Institute at the Graduate Center.

Connect with André

Facebook  ǀ  Twitter ǀ  Goodreads

 

 

Throwback Thursday: Lillian Boxfish Takes A Walk by Kathleen Rooney

whatcathyreadnext2 Comments

ThrowbackThursday

Throwback Thursday is a weekly meme hosted by Renee at It’s Book Talk.  It’s designed as an opportunity to share old favourites as well as books that we’ve finally got around to reading that were published over a year ago.  If you decide to take part, please link back to It’s Book Talk.

Today I’m revisiting a book that I reviewed in the early days of my blog: the engaging and witty, Lillian Boxfish Takes A Walk by Kathleen Rooney, published in January 2017.  It will be available in paperback in April 2018.

Lillian Boxfish Takes A WalkAbout the Book

It’s the last day of 1984, and 85-year-old Lillian Boxfish is about to take a walk.

As she traverses a grittier Manhattan, a city anxious after an attack by a still-at-large subway vigilante, she encounters bartenders, bodega clerks, chauffeurs, security guards, bohemians, criminals, children, parents, and parents-to-be—in surprising moments of generosity and grace. While she strolls, Lillian recalls a long and eventful life that included a brief reign as the highest-paid advertising woman in America—a career cut short by marriage, motherhood, divorce, and a breakdown.

A love letter to city life – however shiny or sleazy – Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk paints a portrait of a remarkable woman across the canvas of a changing America: from the Jazz Age to the onset of the AIDS epidemic; the Great Depression to the birth of hip-hop.

Format: Hardcover, ebook (297 pp.)   Publisher: St Martin’s Press
Published: 17th January 2017               Genre: Literary Fiction

Purchase Links*
Amazon.co.uk ǀ  Amazon.com
*links provided for convenience, not as part of any affiliate programme

 

Find Lillian Boxfish Takes A Walk on Goodreads

My Review

Lillian is stylish, witty (even waspish at times), single-minded, successful, generous but also a woman whose life has not followed an untroubled path.  During her walk on New Year’s Eve, we learn about her pioneering career in advertising, her relationships and get hints of darker times that are only fully revealed towards the end of the book.  Lillian takes pride in her ability to use words as tools (whether to craft advertising copy or poetry) but also, on occasions, as weapons. Some of my favourites “Lillianisms” include:

“My mother resented Sadie like a stepsister resenting Cinderella, but she was polite. She did her no social violence.”

“This time of year is depressing. New Year’s Eve is a bigger thug than any mugger, the way it makes people feel.”

(About her colleague and bête noire, Olive): “I marvelled at her mother’s prescience in having named her daughter after a green – with envy – cocktail garnish: hollow and bitter.” Ouch!

(About her other bête noire, Julia): “She had a beautiful smile, if you like people who have thousands of teeth and no evident capacity ever to be sad.” Double ouch!

As well as the story of Lillian’s life, the book is a love letter to New York (“Any day you walk down a street and find nothing new but nothing missing counts as a good day in a city you love. People are forever tearing something down, replacing something irreplaceable”) and a celebration of walking and the art of flanerie (“Typically neither closeness nor distance matter much to me on my walks. Neither convenience nor difficulty is my objective”).

Another theme seems to be how bigotry and prejudice can cause people to miss out on potentially fulfilling relationships. I really enjoyed the book but, for me, not all of Lillian’s encounters during her walk were as successful or as meaningful as others. I was interested to learn that Lillian is inspired by a real person – Margaret Fishback, who, like her fictional counterpart, was a poet and the highest-paid female advertising copywriter in the world in the 1930s.  You can find out more about Margaret Fishback here.

I received an advance review copy courtesy of NetGalley and St. Martin’s Press

Follow my blog with Bloglovin

In three words: Stylish, witty, engaging

Kathleen RooneyAbout the Author

Kathleen Rooney is a founding editor of Rose Metal Press and a founding member of Poems While You Wait, a team of poets and their typewriters who compose commissioned poetry on demand. She teaches English and Creative Writing at DePaul University and is the author of eight books of poetry, nonfiction, and fiction. A winner of a Ruth Lilly Fellowship from Poetry magazine, her reviews and criticism has appeared in the New York Times Book Review, The Chicago Tribune, The New York Times Magazine and elsewhere. She lives in Chicago with her spouse, the writer Martin Seay. Lillian Boxfish Takes A Walk is her second novel.

Connect with Kathleen

Website ǀ  Twitter  ǀ  Goodreads