![]() ![]() He has repeatedly stated that he despises realism as a literary convention, and steadfastly resisted providing the minutiae of place and personal appearance in Call Me By Your Name, his summer love tale intimately tracing the halting dance of Elio around Oliver, the doctoral student who takes up summer residence in his family home. Imagination is paramount to Aciman, who will visit Australia in early May as a guest speaker at both the Sydney Writers’ Festival and Melbourne’s Wheeler Centre Mayhem event. ![]() ![]() ![]() “I think basically the film makes you love this story, and it compels you to go and get the book and then you realise it has so much more depth, because a film cannot be that deep by definition… it can’t quite capture the book you had in your imagination.” “No, actually, I think that’s the best way to do it,” he responds in a lyrical accent, a product of an interrupted childhood that saw his multilingual Sephardic Jewish family flee Alexandria, Egypt, amidst a wave of anti-Semitism when he was 14. I read his celebrated novel Call Me By Your Name quite some time after seeing, and swooning over Luca Guadagnino’s sumptuous adaptation at last year’s Sydney Film Festival. I have a confession for American author, memoirist, essayist, and academic André Aciman as he speaks to me over the phone from his home in New York on a blearily early Melbourne morning. ![]()
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