Calling Me To Danger

It has been snowing the whole morning with two inches of the white stuff dressing the ground. I was up until two this morning reading two of my favorite books, André Aciman's Call by Your Name, and Eddie De Oliveira's Lucky.

Of the two, Aciman's is undoubtedly the better work. He teaches comparative literature at CUNY. Born into a Sephardic Jewish family originally from Istanbul, he grew up in multilingual Alexandria. His prose exudes the best of a cosmopolitan growing up experience. It is refreshing to see someone juggle concepts so elegant and diverse with such grace and elegance. Okay, I've done my quota of adjectives but every one was worth the risk of overdoing a compliment. We should all be so lucky.

Lucky is apparently the first work of a young Londoner born of an Argentinian mother of Italian stock and a Brazilian father whose ancestors came from Scotland. Another cultural mongrel, Oliveira utilizes the patois of young, rocking Londoners to describe the loneliness, confusion and sudden ecstasies of a teenager discovering love and its many chambered heart.

Both books are heavily internal, monologues written out when thoughts are made to stop in their tracks and their ramifications followed down byways and alleys into tiny rooms where no one had lived for years or to the edges of cliffs overlooking rampaging waves dizzyingly far below. If one were not acquainted with thoughts that love incites, these passages would be onerous but for me they are ambrosia from Ganymedes' cup, luscious, airy and sweet, the very stuff of fantasy and what is life without fantasies like this? 

To read these books, especially Aciman's wonderful prose, is to attempt the impossible with sodden words, to run the gauntlet for the flimsiest reward just so one can breathe love again.