One of my favorite reads this past year was André Aciman’s endearing and heartbreaking Call Me By Your Name. Despite my many social and economic differences with the teenage protagonist, I was immediately transported to the passion inflamed by adolescent love.
I was particularly struck by the advice given by the protagonist’s father on dealing with heartbreak:
We rip out so much of ourselves to be cured of things faster than we should that we go bankrupt by the age of thirty and have less to offer each time we start with someone new. But to feel nothing so as not to feel anything—what a waste!
It’s a moment that, when dramatized in the movie, comes off as what New Yorker writer Richard Brody derisively calls “a rich and potent Oscar syrup.” While I think Brody is a bit harsh, I do think the book more subtly addresses how suppressing sorrow can leave hollow shells in one’s life.
If anything from this novel will sit with me for years, it’s the idea that experience is not something to be “cured” but to be relished. Whether it’s a doomed love or a too-short book, many experiences are better embraced and examined than rushed through.