Tricks of Memory

In a place as another of the Italian Riviera, in an old past twenty years, Elio back on the summer of seventeen years and the route then lived with Oliver, a young American university received in Residence at his parents. Although no label strikes the story, this is probably one of the finest novels of love between two men that I have ever read in recent years.
Up to a point, later or never could read as history, relatively linear, a summer love, with its setting (idyllic), its motley gallery of secondary characters (family, servants, neighbors) , its stages, hesitations, turnovers, and announced an end. This could happen in 1980, but the author has blurred anchoring the narrative in a precise time. The family villa forms a heavenly haven, opening on the other corners shelled in the area, including many access to the sea. But the narrator has spared many pitfalls, ellipses, modulations, which blur the cards (provided that attention here). The border between dreams and accomplishments is thin and just a few pages to it moves. And if Oliver (the lover) keeps most of its opacity until the end of the novel, it is a magnificent portrait of young man, unaware of himself despite his sagacity, that emerges Elio in mirror of his later me.