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This is the blog of Ian Rosales Casocot. Filipino writer. Sometime academic. Former backpacker. Twink bait. Hamster lover.

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Monday, November 07, 2011

entry arrow5:34 PM | The Summer of Desire

I was waiting for this book forever. I can’t remember exactly how I stumbled upon it. Probably some breathless mention in some blog, or some online article about literatures dissecting desire. But Andre Aciman’s Call Me By Your Name hooked me sight unseen, and samples of its first few pages only whetted my appetite. But I would like to think I am blessed with good friends — even people I have not even met — and one of them is the Filipino-American writer Veronica Montes, who read my tweets about my wanting, like a huge chasm of hunger, to have this book. “I have this book,” she tweeted back. “I’ll send it to you as soon as I find it.” Was that four or five months ago? I don’t exactly remember now — but I knew it was coming. And when it did, about four days ago, I pounced on Aciman’s love story and finished it within the next six hours, from midnight till the bright hours of dawn. And all I can say is: How can someone know me so much, enough to tell my own story? What strange alchemy did Aciman master to give a thorough mapping out of desire and love and time and the games we play in the name of carnal attraction so profound it borders on the spiritual? For his story, about a 17-year-old boy named Elio who falls for the 23-year-old scholar on a six-week summer fellowship in his father’s Italian Riviera home, is muscular, lovely, sexy, and lyrical about its explorations of its themes without once resorting to cheap sentimentalism. This book is a love letter to love, and I am a better man — so much understanding now of my own self — for having read it.

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