“I met you, but I also met myself there, just as you also copied a broken part of me; I was no longer just me, but a fragment of my soul that I received from you, you. The soul in me is looking for a history different from its own."

1.

"Summer Finale" is a timeless novella that tells the story of The same-sex love story between a 17-year-old Italian boy and a 24-year-old American scholar is emotionally rich and restrained, and deeply saturated with sadness.

The structure of the story is like a piano sonata, consisting of three parts: presentation (Chapter 1), development (Chapter 2, Chapter 3) and recapitulation (Chapter 4). It progresses layer by layer, circuitous and reciprocating, integrating polyphony and variation. After the song ends, the most beautiful movement still lingers for a long time. The final song of summer is final but not final.

An encounter becomes the arrival and eternal return of life.

2.

The author of the novel is Andre Aciman, a writer with Jewish identity. It is reported that Andre Aciman was born in Egypt in 1951 and grew up in a multi-lingual environment such as French, Italian, and Arabic. Because of their Jewish identity, his parents were deported by the Egyptian government. Later, they became Italian citizens and moved to New York, USA in 1968. Andre later received a doctorate in comparative literature from Harvard University and now teaches comparative literature and Proust at the City University of New York.

In the novel, Andre's two protagonists are also endowed with Jewish souls. Eliot, a 17-year-old boy who has just begun to fall in love, meets the love of his life, 24-year-old Oliver, in a seaside town in Italy. From the undercurrent of emotion and temptation (Chapter 1) to confession and embrace (Chapter 2) , Chapter 3), the sea breeze throughout the summer was stirring for their encounter. Haydn's music, Shelley's All Hearts, Monet's Cliff Path, and St. Clement's Church all bear witness to the hesitation, intensity, and sorrow of parting in youth. Pain itself is not something to be envied; what is enviable is the ability to feel pain. At an age where you can do whatever you want, you can't live without going crazy.

If the story ended abruptly here, it would not have anything to do with the word "meaningful". Precisely, the author added the fourth chapter "Reappearance" to the story. Everything that happened in his youth no longer appears in the second half of his life as "forgotten in the world". Your name and my name will forever live in each other's memories, blood, and lives. Half a life later, they met again. Although years had passed, during the night when they shared their feelings, they suddenly discovered that each other's lives were only defined by that summer.

Either time passes through us, or we pass through time. It turns out that we just keep going back to where we started. What time has changed is our appearance, but what has not changed is our sincerity for each other.

3.

The novel is written in the first person of Elio, and the inner monologue and real dialogue reflect each other in the writing. It is like a polyphony, asking and answering questions and dissolving itself. It increases the emotional thickness and enhances the concentration of the narrative.

Let us see that a person's psychological activities are so complex and ups and downs, and the way of displaying them is so limited, such as hesitating to speak, unable to express what he means, and such as taking deception as truth.

“I feel like there’s a veil everywhere: between what I want, what I don’t know I want, what I don’t want to know I want, and what I always know I want… this If it’s not a miracle, it’s hell.”

We often say things we don’t mean, do some incredible things, and even make self-righteous judgments based on our misunderstanding of each other.

4.

"Summer Finale" provides an example for youth literature. It depicts the rush and stickiness of emotions. Here, youth is not just Being young and ignorant is not just pain and ferocity, its existence is existence itself.

Except for youth, which is worthy of singing, no other stage of life will have such a unique mark or such endless music. The veins that grow from there lead to the crown of the tree. It is no longer just a look back, it is that time and being here.

Mark Twain once said: "Life is so short, we don't have time to quarrel, vent, blame each other, there is only enough time to love..."