The sleepy dreaminess of this book fits the narrator’s plodding remembrance of his past. The prose carries the reader slowly through the story of a teenaged boy who crashes hard into lust and love for the first time. Besson captures that feeling that nothing else in the world exists, the exhilaration when you’re nearby that one most important crush, the hours and days spent waiting and worrying that you may never see them again and that when you do, you won’t live up to what they desire. It’s a story about how we don’t forget these first infatuations/loves and how they can change our entire perception of the world forever. And it’s about the circumstances that allow us to open to the world or be closed to everyone, even ourselves.

I can’t help but compare this book to Call Me By Your Name by Andre Aciman. Especially since this book came out over a decade after, I think it’s fair. Both books are about a young man coming into his adult sexuality and discovering for a brief period “the one”. And both are reflections from an adult man, looking back on those years wistfully and lovingly and wondering. But while CMBYN explores a wild, sometimes unbelievable (though Aciman makes you believe it) series of adventures, Lie With Me paints a tableau, almost in grayscale, of a place and time that doesn’t move or change, where the protagonist exists and comes into himself but, critically, leaves and joins the rest of us in the revolving, changing, shrinking world.

While this wasn’t my favourite book this year, it was beautifully written and translated, and at a (generously spaced) 150 pages, it’s worth grabbing and devouring.

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