#cmbyn novella

[yourbasicbrowngirl]

[eeriebarbie]

hi hi! i’m fandom brainrotting again and looking for a few different threads on discord. most specifically, i’m dying to write sydney & carmen/sydcarmy from the bear and felix & oliver/cattonquick from saltburn, but my other fandoms are listed below!!! i’m generally open to writing just about anything and the rest of my rules r listed below. if you’re at all interested, add me on discord @eeriebarbie!!!

- pls be 18+ minimum and 20+ preferably

- i do tend to prefer novella-style writing so I would love if you preferred this too! i don’t really write under character limit lol

- I exclusively write on discord!

- totally okay with discussing limits, aus, headcanons, plots, etc—i’m a certified yapper so be warned lol. i love chatting ooc and making playlists & pin boards and being generally annoying!!!

- i don’t have character preferences but typically play sydney & felix more often out of the two i’m most interested in rn!!! but ugh literally im just dying to write

other fandoms im into that id also be so down to write include star wars, red dead redemption, succession, so. many. horror movies, cmbyn, euphoria, interview with the vampire, the hunger games (tbosas & og) and. like. actually so many more. if you’re interested in my ships in any of these fandoms just dm me!!

[heavenlyyshecomes]

8, 14, 133 for the book asks? 💌

a book you finished in one sitting

The burning god! Not exactly in one sitting but I did read like more than half of it in a day it was so addictive (and sad ...)

a book that made you trip on literary acid

a certain hunger by chelsea g summers !

a book that you came across randomly and fell in love with

i found the pushkin press series of japanese novellas randomly and loved all of them but if I had to pick one book it'd be sarah winman's tin man it's like a mature and well written cmbyn

[isitandwonder]

I had a lovely evening at Andre Aciman’s reading of Enigma Variations, which in German is now called ‘Fünf Lieben lang’.

It was a bit unusual for me at first because despite the reading taking place during a literature festival here in my hometown he’d been invited by the Instituto Italiano, so the talk was in Italian (and then translated into German) while the passages read out from the book were in German and later we asked questions in English...

Anyway, what I remember: he explained that EV is a book describing something undescribable, the problem that love can’t be captured in words. That he wrote 5 variations without the original theme, so we don’t know what Paul truly wants. Even Paul doesn’t know it. He has no words for it, just lives these 5 little adventures to find out but doesn’t in the end. He may get close but never fully grasps what he’s chasing.

In the first chapter, Paul doesn’t really know what he wants, doesn’t realize why he admires Nani, what’s going on. He has no words for it. And he inherits what he later realizes was his first love (again, the theme of time and love).

Andre likes the scene on the balcony in the second chapter, and the scene in the taxi in which, without many words, it becomes clear that Paul likes boys as well as girls and that this isn’t a problem.

His Manfreds/Manfredis are kinda hints at Manfred, King of Sicily in the 13th century. He was the son of Emperor Frederick II who’s mentioned in the second chapter. Remember Oliver went to Sicily as well before arriving at the Perlmans? So there are many historical influences on his writing. Did I mention that he’s quite smart?

The Manfred chapter is kind of the cenral chapter of the book. Though the character stays strangely silent. We don’t know much about him. It’s maybe the most cmbyn chapter as in it Paul mostely chases him, and when he has him has no real idea what to do with him.

Andre likes the snarky character of Chloe and described her and Paul’s love as something that will endure everything but will never be. They are not made to live together, just to meet every few years, like a vulcano errupting. Star Love is based on the friendship between Wagner and Nietzsche (is that a surprising choice for a Jewish author?) who at some points couldn’t stand each other yet admired each other. Their love could only happen on another planet, removed from reality.

They didn’t talk about the end of the book as people should read it for themselves (the ending is surprising).

Ha, and I dared to ask a question! I asked him how he decided on the form of his novels, if he planned them and why their style was so different but also similar being written in first person, but EV being more 5 short stories while cmbyn was a stream of consciousness novel. He answered that this just happened, that EV became 5 novellas connected by the narrator while cmbyn was a true novel, though both had happened a little by accident. He said at one point you know a story is over. You could drag it out for 300000 words more but it would not give anyone anything. He said people asked him why he didn’t just write the live of Paul, or Elio, and he said that would have become too long, too boring. He wanted to highlight some important parts of their lives, not tell every detail. And that you just know as a writer when a story is over. And then you’re finished (it made me so happy cause I really feel him in that regard). He also described his physical act of writing: that he has a gadget that forces him o sit straight at his laptop, so he can’t slouch or slack (sounds like torture).

Another question was how he felt about the movie adaption of cmbyn, if he’d been worried, and he said no, he’d been delighted, that authors should be open to their works being used in different media. He also said that he first feared that Luca did a soppy movie when he heard the last scene was Elio crying in front of a fireplace, but when he saw it he said to Luca that his ending was better than the novel. He said authors should be open, and that film could do things different from literature, which was great.

He also said that he could never write a screenplay or for theater. That he has tried but that it doesn’t work. The dialogue in his novels just happens and comes up spontaneously, but that he can’t force it.

Then he was lovely signing books and asked me about my name which is quite conventional in Germany but maybe he thought I was from somewhere else. I told him that my last name is much more difficult and he was so charming and kind and patient. He’s a very fine and smart man.

[sea-changed]

vermiculated replied to your post: the second quarter of 2019 in books 

re: 30, 35, 38: when we asked for f/f, we should have be clearer about our desires: "I want a good book and when they have sex, they can get a little freaky. also I already know about feminism so please take that as read and let them have interesting flaws."

Truly. “I know you’re afraid that books about women won’t sell, but the answer to this is not making the blandest possible characters have the blandest possible romance. No, really, I promise.”

34: ha ha, I assume you are referring to the part where the first third is about various insuperable objections to what happens over the next two-thirds of the book and are never really answered? Not a single book in her oeuvre has a real ending, and I've decided to just live with that.

Right, though? And it comes with the intriguing corollary of a plotline that splits completely at roughly the halfway mark (did you know that Richard’s mother’s death isn’t mentioned one single time after they return from her house?). I think this is perhaps a book that suffers for its genre: I always have the feeling I’d enjoy David/Richard a lot more if it were upfront about its weird tragical nature, and did not try and paper over those cracks with sweeping romantic sentiment.

39! I was entirely swept away by this series last fall, even the kind of clumsy parts. I am glad you did read it, it's weird as all get out but I feel like it owns that in the best sort of pastiche/way where I was always hoping some dude in a Wilkie Collins novel would up and have a husband.

I am pleased I gave it another shot, and while it felt rushed in parts (in truth I want all Charles novels to be like three times longer than they actually are), there were enough interesting feelings that I mostly forgave it.

Ali Smith and Alan Hollinghurst, knocking it out of the park this summer! I agree with you entirely on Hollinghurst: a book is a bunch of sentences, the sentences are admittedly great, why is the book not better? why not, Alan?

Hollinghurst is such a mystery to me: I love the concepts of his books and the great sentence ratio therein is so high, and yet they still are just not that great. Reading Line of Beauty, I think one reason is that I feel so removed from what’s actually happening: the irony that fosters so many of the great lines also leaves the characters feeling somewhat flat and washed-out, and the relationships hardly visible.

What did you think of "Lie With Me" because so far the only people who have said that they like it are people whose judgment I do not trust, as "Call Me By Your Name" was a much weirder book than any of them will admit.

I didn’t not like it, though unfortunately that might be the best that can be said. The CMBYN comparisons aren’t wrong, though not perhaps for the reasons people are making them: the weird alienation from its own characters and somewhat poisonous nostalgia are certainly present in both. I thought LWM was going to end up doing more interesting things with storytelling and narrative construction, but it never quite got as far as I wanted it to. And, in my view, it really needed to do something intellectually interesting to make up for the fact that it’s not particularly emotionally interesting: the narrator’s voice really prevents you from actually feeling anything about the book, as he has such a stranglehold on the narrative throughout that none of the characters, including his younger self, ever really emerge as people. (It turns out every creative writing professor really is right, and it really is super boring to be told everything in a book.) Combined with the fact that it’s so short--really more novella-lengthed--it felt like it never really got to breathe properly as a story.

anyway, I am evidently excited and will have to read a number of these -- I do love your booklists!

Your bookish enthusiasm is always highly appreciated around these parts, and I would love to know your opinions if you do read any of them!

[audreyhheart]

any books to read after call me by your name?

I wrote a post about this here. Even though it seems counterintuitive, the closest reading experience I could think of was The Grandmothers by Doris Lessing.

I just noticed that tumblr deleted my Enigma Variations review (!) I guess the cover was too racy (???). Jfc. I highly recommend it as a post-CMBYN read. Here’s my review:

If Call Me by Your Name stabbed you in the heart, Aciman’s new novel, Enigma Variations, will twist the knife.

Told in five linked novellas, the novel charts the romantic obsessions of the narrator, Paul, over the course of his life. I read it shortly after reading CMBYN and it felt like Aciman was filling in the gaps left behind in that novel.

The first novella, First Love, resembles CMBYN most closely. Set on a fictional Italian island, it’s about 12-year-old Paul’s crush on a local cabinetmaker. Once again, Aciman captures romantic longing so convincingly, so evocatively, that even I fell in love with that fucking cabinetmaker! This novella, like the others, has a great twist at the end.

The third novella, Manfred, also brought me back to CMBYN. Paul, now a thirty-something living in Manhattan, secretly lusts after a handsome German man at his tennis club for two years. This chapter is HOT. I’ve always been grossed out by men’s locker rooms–well, not anymore! Aciman is truly at his best when describing raw sexual desire and the internal obstacles that prevent us from realizing those desires.

The fourth novella, Star Love, was one of my favourites because there’s a subplot told in flashback where Paul discovers that he is someone else’s romantic obsession. Paul gives to that man what he spent his whole life chasing since his first unrequited love for the cabinetmaker. (Damn you, Nanni!)      

If you loved CMBYN, you should definitely give this a read. It’s heart wrenching but not as acutely painful as Elio and Oliver’s love story. (In other words, I was able to get out of bed the next morning.) It’s multifaceted, and explores different shades of romantic obsession and how it changes and doesn’t change with time. But like CMBYN, it’s overarching theme is regret and yearning to live a life that’s true to your desires and yourself, to find true intimacy with another person so that you may “drink from the wine of life.”

[victuuri-victory]

CMBYN quote analysis

Ok but, in the novel, when Elio says "if I could have him like this in my dreams every night of my life, I'd stake my entire life on dreams and be done with the rest", firstly I fucking memorized that ASAP, but my internal screeching aside, I think that quote is amazing and let me tell you why.

In the literal sense, "stake" in "I'd stake my entire life on dreams means "to bet, to hazard something, to gamble something on a risky outcome".

But also consider that "stake" can mean those wooden stakes forcibly driven into the ground and/or dracula's heart, those stakes people are tied to and burned. If you see that way, "I'd stake my entire life on dreams" takes on a secondary deathly connotation, it points to a death of the self, to a loss of this entire life and entire reality because Elio wants to escape into fantasy.

However, you can also take the quote positively, so that it's less about Elio's unhealthy romantic behaviour dooming their relationship and dooming his life to stagnation, and more about how this brief summer love was fully worth it because it can sustain him for the rest of his life. Elio said it himself elsewhere that, while he regrets ending the relationship, he does not regret the precious emotional experience. In this sense, "stake" may refer to that meaning of it where plants are propped and supported by stakes. Seen that way, "I'd stake my entire life on dreams" no longer connotes the death of the self- his life is alive and well like a creeping plant curled around a stake, but this life is ultimately sustained and supported by his dreams of his Oliver, which lies in the centre of his existence.

So what I'm saying is that I may be overthinking but I think this quote has so much meaning and dear lord it's just beautiful, someone stop me before I litcrit the whole book in some rambling novella of an essay.

[audreyhheart]

Do you know more books like CMBYN, with a beautiful prose and a dream like state?

I found the prose to be a stream-of-consciousness rather than dreamlike. I think the obvious answer would be In Search of Lost Time by Proust since Aciman is a Proust scholar and cmbyn a Proustian novel concerned with memory and time. I’m rereading Swann’s Way (vol 1) right now and it’s like reading Elio’s older, more neurotic, cousin. It’s true what they say that every novel is a conversation with the novels that came before it.

But I know I had a VERY similar reading experience to cmbyn that wasn’t Proust and it just dawned on me today what it was. The novella The Grandmothers by Doris Lessing. This. Novella. Is. Wild. Okay, bear with me, this is a little off topic. 

So, The Grandmothers is about two women Roz and Lil, who are best friends and inseparable. They have a double wedding and settle with their husbands in adjoining houses by the sea. They each have one son and the sons become best friends just like their mothers… Lil’s husband dies and Roz’s husband leaves and when the boys are seventeen they fall in love with each other’s mothers. Lil’s son moves into Roz’s house and Roz’s son moves into Lil’s house where they live as lovers. The novella opens and closes in the future, when the sons are married with children of their own and one of the wives discovers what happened and realizes that the four are clearly still in love. 

The seaside setting, the age of the boys, the intensity of the relationships, the fact that they never get over it, and the looking back all reminded me of cmbyn.            

[audreyhheart]

top 5 moments from the movie?

I’ve got a list of 13 if you search my “cmbyn favourite moments” tag.

Some other smaller moments that I loved:

1. When Oliver and Marzia meet for the first time. She is walking downstairs from Elio’s bedroom and Oliver is walking upstairs toward it. Perfect metaphor for these romantic rivals! They meet in the middle and she says enchanté and kisses both his cheeks.

2. Elio lying on his parents’ laps while his mother reads the novella about the knight who asks whether it’s “better to speak or die.” Elio says he���ll never be brave enough to even ask the question and his parents comfort him. Can the Perlman’s please adopt me?      

3. Elio lying on Marzia and Chiara’s laps after his nosebleed while they comfort him. OUR SON IS SPOILED 

4. The Italian drudges arguing at lunch. One asks Oliver what he thinks and the other is like, “he doesn’t know anything he’s American.” HAHAHAHAHAHA

5. Oliver sweating as he and Mr. Perlman go through the slides of nude male sculptures the day Oliver is going to have sex with Elio for the first time. Oliver says, “they’re so… erotic.”   

[audreyhheart]

goddess- replied to your post : Do you know more books like CMBYN, with a...

@laurapalmerspen wait is the grandmothers the book the movie adore is based on cause I couldn’t get that movie out of my head after I watched it. (Thank you! I had no idea it was based on a book bow I have something to add to my reading list)

Yes! I've never actually seen the movie but the novella is incredible!!! It’s one in a collection of four that were published as one book. I read it shortly after reading Lessing’s The Fifth Child. She is such a master at handling taboo subject matter. It’s unflinching and she writes with such precision. This could have been a really long novel but she manages to say twice as much in half the length. I was stunned by it and yes, I couldn’t get the story out of my head either...