![]() ![]() The end of their affair is premeditated - Oliver is a grad student visiting from America, and his inevitable departure is as much a player in the couple’s passion as anything else. In the novel, 17-year-old Elio and 24-year-old Oliver begin a brief, storybook-like romance, swayed by the serendipity of time and circumstance and the languorous summertime beauty of rural Italy. Back when it was published in 2007, you wouldn’t have thought André Aciman’s gay romance, Call Me By Your Name, to be fertile ground for this sort of treatment. ![]() ![]() Romances extend their timelines in order to facilitate an endless narrative of breaking up and getting back together again. Comics and superhero films use sequels and prequels as a means of canon-building (and of course, money-making). Sequels, filled as they are with the potential for unnecessary elongation, are especially prone to this kind of development. ![]() In the 21st century, where shorter and more plainly entertaining modes of storytelling exist all around, novels should at the very least summon something deeper in readers than simply satisfaction. Beyond traditional storytelling, novels contain within their long history the desire to surprise and innovate, and works that retread familiar territory are not often received well among the critical masses. There’s hardly a genre less hospitable to acts of blatant fan service than literary fiction. ![]()
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