The <em>Call Me by Your Name </em>Dream Continues

Elio and Oliver, the lovers at the center of André Aciman’s 2007 novel, Call Me by Your Name, and its 2017 Oscar-winning film adaptation, have a claim to enjoying one of the most cherished gay trysts in all of modern fiction.

Their love story was almost a death story.

Aciman’s novel began as a writing exercise about the author’s plans for a visit to Italy. Along the way, it mutated into a tale about a boy lusting after a woman at his family’s villa. It then mutated again so that the object of obsession became a man: Oliver, a swaggering American grad student on a summer residency. As Aciman unspooled the 17-year-old Elio’s inner monologue of desire for the handsome intruder down the hall, he implanted references to the writer Percy Shelley’s 1822 death off the Italian coast. These references were meant to foreshadow that Oliver would drown. Or that maybe he’d go back to the United States. “I didn’t want to consummate their love,” Aciman told me when I visited him at the sparsely decorated but spacious Upper West Side apartment where he has lived with his wife for three decades. “I didn’t want to go there. I don’t like to write about sex, believe it or not.”

But at every juncture when it came time to kill off Oliver, Aciman spared him. It was more “fun,” he said, to write him alive than dead. And so Aciman