Plot summary

The Perlmans own a villa outside of Moscazzano in Northern Italy, where they spend their summers and Hannukah. They invite a graduate student to spend six weeks with them over the summer to help Professor Perlman with his work. This summer - 1983 - the student in question is an American named Oliver. While there, Oliver largely associates with the Perlmans' seventeen year old son Elio and Elio's friends, the females among the group whose hearts are aflutter by Oliver's preppy good looks. Oliver, in fact, takes up casually with one of them, Chiara. Elio is an intellectual, but has no experience with girls as he is only now experimenting with his initial stage of manhood and masculinity. If not for Oliver, Elio probably would have chosen Chiara himself, and as such takes up with Marzia instead. Despite their social association and sleeping in adjoining rooms in the villa, Elio doesn't much like Oliver in thinking him too cocky and arrogant partly in that brash American sensibility. In turn, Oliver believes Elio is patronizing in his outward dislike of him. These outward behaviors mask the fact that there is a deep attraction between Elio and Oliver based largely on their admiration of the other's intellect. When they eventually admit that attraction late into Oliver's stay, Oliver is more reticent to act on those feelings in not wanting to ruin his own or Elio's life in still being in the closet, while Elio wants to experience all that sex and love are as he is in the flush of first real love. With Oliver and Elio's clandestine relationship, Elio has to figure out what to do about Marzia, he who may be aware or unaware of her own very deep feelings for him in also experiencing that flush of first love. The other question then becomes if Elio will be able to recover as there will definitely be an end at least to this phase of Oliver and Elio's romance when Oliver leaves to go home at the end of the summer.—Huggo