95
and his crew freedom with the source
material. Guadagnino has discussed
wanting to make a sequel to Call Me
by Your Name and has spoken pub-
licly about prominently featuring the
AIDS crisis in the version he is writing,
but he says he hopes to meet with Aci-
man in New York and discuss combin-
ing their visions. Aciman is “generous,”
Guadagnino says, and “does not per-
ceive everything from the perspective
of his own art.”
But to hear Aciman tell it, in a word,
he’s “weird.” He is certainly unpre-
dictable. He writes wise books about
the nature of love and time and the
inter actions of those forces, and yet
he claims to think like a 14-year-old.
(He’s 68.) His books endlessly pour out
ways to say “I love you,” without saying
it, the focus on what motivates people
to speak, feel or behave the way they do.
“I’m only interested in what two people
or three people will do when they’re sit-
ting down and chatting together,” he
says, from the facing couch. “That really
is what fascinates me.”Though he is “quiTe sTraighT,”
Aciman says life taught him what it is to
be “totally fluid.” That, along with imagi-
nation, is what he says allowed him to
write such a convincing same-sex love
story—a question about identity that is
often asked when it comes to this book.
Writing the explicit man-on-man sex in
Call Me by Your Name, Aciman says, took
no particular courage. “I just wrote it,” he
says, shrugging. Still, he acknowledges
there’s an irony that he, the straight guy,
wrote gay sex that was toned down con-
siderably in the film by Guadagnino, who
is gay. That was one of the chief criti-
cisms of the adaptation—that scenes
like the one in which Oliver eats a peach
that Elio has used for a sex act were re-
strained in the movie.
“I got a lot of mail of people say-
ing, ‘Why doesn’t he eat the peach? We
wanted to see that,’ ” Aciman says. “I un-
derstand.” Even so, he was pleased with
the film and admits he’s not a big fan of
watching sex scenes himself. He chalks
up any cinematic chastity to “compro-
mises” standard in the film industry.
As in Call Me by Your Name, the set-
tings in Find Me are idyllic—the novel
takes us through Rome, Paris, New York
and back to the Italian countryside. His
characters are secure financially and un-
burdened by the bigotry that in other
stories threatens queer love. The turbu-
lence, in Aciman’s world, calls from in-
side the house.
“My belief is that whenever you
go into somebody’s head— anyone’s
head—it’s all insecurity,” he says. “It’s
all doubt, it’s all reluctance, it’s all inhi-
bition, shame, that’s all it is. There are
sparks of desire that keep us interested
in real life, but ultimately there’s some-
thing suffocating all of us.” That sense
of instability and insecurity has an obvi-
ous root in his life story, and it finds its
way into the lives of his characters, un-
lucky lovers included. “I live with that
fear that in a minute,” he says, “every-
thing could go away.” □“I love you.” He denies being a roman-
tic but concedes that is he perhaps a
“ romantic—with a sense of irony.” His
medium is literature, yet he believes
classical music is the “topmost layer of
aesthetic production of mankind.” Find
Me’s four chapters are named after mu-
sical terms (“Tempo,” “Cadenza,” “Ca-
priccio” and “Da Capo”). Invoking the
art form he finds superior is, he says,
his way of saying, “O.K., guys, if I’m not
perfect, at least I know what is.”
Aciman’s living room is lined with
seascape paintings of varying degrees
of abstraction. He doesn’t like details,
he says, which sounds like a contradic-
tion from a writer of such precision.
But it’s the mundane, granular details
he dislikes. Aciman writes in the tradi-
tion of roman d’analyse or, as he frames△
Aciman tried for years to write a sequel to Call Me by Your Name but
struggled to find a way in; a chance encounter led to a breakthrough