Call Me By Your Name by André Aciman
Published 2007 · 70,400 words · about 5 hours at an average pace
How hard is Call Me By Your Name to read?
Call Me By Your Name scores 48 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it moderately challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 58 out of 100
- Educated, allusive vocabulary with a good deal of Italian and classical reference.
- Sentence structure: 65 out of 100
- Long, looping, digressive sentences.
- Abstraction: 55 out of 100
- Physical desire constantly turned into reflection on memory and time.
- Information density: 48 out of 100
- Light on incident, heavy on interiority.
- Narrative indirection: 40 out of 100
- Elio narrates years later, which colours everything without concealing it.
- Symbolic density: 52 out of 100
- The peach, the statue and the town square all carry sustained weight.
- Ironic distance: 40 out of 100
- Gentle irony at the younger self, no more.
- Resolution withholding: 55 out of 100
- The novel ends on an unanswered question about what was lost.
- Structural complexity: 35 out of 100
- Four parts, broadly chronological.
How Call Me By Your Name is regarded
Call Me By Your Name holds a literary regard score of 61 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.