“I was tempted to remove it from the script,” he confesses. Something similar happened after Luca Guadagnino, best known for exquisite meditations on passions both thwarted and unbridled in movies like I Am Love, signed on to direct the movie. Aciman thought about cutting it, then left it to his editor to decide.
That scene, which plays out across several pages with potent intensity, almost didn’t make it into the novel. In the novel’s most famous scene, boy also gets peach-a kind of dry run for what the narrator, Elio Perlman, fantasizes about doing with Oliver, a research assistant staying at his family’s summer villa on the Italian Riviera. Is there a sexier book than Call Me by Your Name, André Aciman’s 2007 paean to eros awoken during a sultry, sensuous Italian summer? “This novel is hot,” wrote Stacey D’Erasmo in the first line of her review for The New York Times, echoing the sentiments of the book’s legions of fans for whom it quickly became a touchstone of adolescent gay longing with a satisfying twist-one often denied in our coming-out narratives: Desire is rewarded hunger is sated.
