Call me by your name.

by Andre Aciman

Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 256 pages. $23.

"Do I dare to eat a peach?" Read this book and the line from T. S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" will take on quite a new meaning. Aciman, who's an authority on Marcel Proust, channels the master in the telling of this romance between 24-year-old Oliver, a graduate student, and the budding 17-year-old Elio--son of a professor with whom Oliver is working. It is the boy who tells the story, albeit from a distance of decades. In a sense, the novel is a remembrance of things past, a conjuring much like Proust's of a world of sensation and sensuality, of longing and ecstasy one summer on the coast of Italy. From the sound of cicadas to the intimacy of the odor inside a recently worn bathing suit, it is a world of ultra-awareness. We are filled with this boy's exuberance, anxiety, and joy. Only in the short, final section of the book, when Elio tries to sum up the years since that summer, does the novel lose its rapture. Elio, as narrator, brings to mind Olivier, the boy in Andre Gide's The Counterfeiters, who, upon attainment of his desire, wanted to die, knowing that he would never again feel such fulfillment. This magical summer on the Italian Riviera is too intense, too utopian ever to continue into less glowing seasons. Paradoxically, it is also too deep ever to disappear. To quote a poem by D. H. Lawrence, "time will dim the moon/ Sooner than our full consummation here/ In this odd life will tarnish or pass away." So it is with Elio and Oliver. Aciman's word mastery is as dazzling in this gay love story as it was in his acclaimed memoir Out of Egypt. His new book makes a sacred rite of this teenager's discovery of self, eros, and love, one that provides the reader with an exquisite trip into the human psyche.