The literal story is a tale of adolescent sexual awakening, set in the very well-appointed home of an academic, on the Italian Riviera, in the mid-1980s. Elio, the precocious 17-year-old son of the esteemed and open-minded scholar and his wife, falls fast and hard for Oliver, a 24-year-old postdoc teaching at Columbia, who has come to the mansion for six weeks to revise his manuscript — on Heraclitus, since this is a novel about time and love — before publication. Elio is smart, nervous, naïve, but also bold; Oliver is handsome, seductive and breezily American, given to phrases like “Later,” and abundantly “O.K. with” many things Elio is less O.K. with — O.K. with being Jewish, “with his body, with his looks, with his antic backhand, with his choice of books, music, films, friends.” From the first page, we know we’re in the crumbling terrain of memory. “I shut my eyes, say the word, and I’m back in Italy,” Elio writes from some later vantage point. Which is also, of course, to say: I am not in Italy now, I am not that young man, what I am going to describe is long over. Heraclitus, indeed.

The younger Elio has apparently been more or less heterosexual until Oliver arrives, but in fewer than 15 pages he’s already in a state he calls the “swoon.” He lies around on his bed in the long Mediterranean afternoons hoping Oliver will walk in, feeling “fire like fear, like panic, like one more minute of this and I’ll die if he doesn’t knock at my door, but I’d sooner he never knock than knock now. I had learned to leave my French windows ajar, and I’d lie on my bed wearing only my bathing suit, my entire body on fire. Fire like a pleading that says, Please, please, tell me I’m wrong, tell me I’ve imagined all this, because it can’t possibly be true for you as well, and if it’s true for you too, then you’re the cruelest man alive.”