Andre Aciman · 2007 · exile

Aciman's 2007 novel. A seventeen-year-old spends six weeks of 1983 at his family's villa on the Italian Riviera with the graduate student his father has invited for the summer - and the rest of the book is the twenty years afterwards, in which neither of them quite manages to say it again.

1. 1
   B.

   A villa on the Italian Riviera in the summer of 1983, where a professor takes in a graduate student for six weeks each year - and Elio is seventeen, and this year's is an American of twenty-four who says later instead of goodbye.

2. 2
   Monet's berm

   The hidden spot along the shore that Elio shows him and nobody else knows about - and where, after weeks of not saying it, he finally does, and the whole middle of the book turns on one conversation on a rock.

3. 3
   Rome

   Three days at the end of the summer: a poet's book launch, a night walk through the city until dawn, and San Clemente - a church built on a church built on a temple, which Aciman uses to say what he thinks people are like.

4. 4
   New England

   Fifteen years on, Elio visits Oliver at the American college where he now teaches, with a wife and two sons - and Oliver shows him a room, and neither of them says the thing they both came to say.

5. 5
   B.

   Twenty years after that first summer Oliver comes back to the villa, and Elio takes him to the berm - and asks him to say, if only for a moment, the one word that was the whole of it, which is where the book ends.