find me andre aciman book review

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by André Aciman ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 29, 2019

An elegant, memorable story of enduring love across the generations.

Aciman ( Eight White Nights , 2010, etc.) picks up the storyline of his best-known novel to trace the lives of its actors 20 years on.

In Aciman’s breakthrough novel, Call Me By Your Name , the young protagonist, Elio, is reassured by his father that there’s no wrong or shame in loving another man—in this instance, a visiting American named Oliver. In this sequel, Sami, the father, is the man freshly in love, 10 years later. Southbound for Rome on a train that takes forever to arrive, he falls into easy, sometimes-teasing conversation with young Miranda, who cuts to the chase after a few dozen pages by saying, “When was the last time you were with a girl my age who’s not exactly ugly and who is desperately trying to tell you something that should have been quite obvious by now." Indeed, and love blossoms, complete with intellectual repartee with Miranda’s bookish, sophisticated father. Fathers indeed loom large in Aciman’s tale: Though sometimes far from the scene, they reverberate, as with the father of Michel, an older man to whom Elio becomes attached in the second part of the novel. Does he miss his late father, Elio asks, to which Michel replies, “Miss him? Not really. Maybe because, unlike my mother who died eight years ago, he never really died for me. He’s just absent.” Of a philosophical bent, Michel ponders wisely on the differences between his younger and older selves, prompting Elio to recall his one great love. Somehow, perhaps not entirely believably, Oliver, well established back home in the States, receives that brainwave (“ It’s me, isn’t it, it’s me you’re looking for… ”), for, with quiet regrets, he ends a long marriage and makes his way back into the past—the future, that is—to find Elio once again. Aciman blends assuredly mature themes with deep learning in which the likes of Bach and Cavafy and several languages grace the proceedings, and his story is touching without being sentimental even if some of it is too neatly inevitable.

Pub Date: Oct. 29, 2019

ISBN: 978-0-374-15501-8

Page Count: 272

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Review Posted Online: July 27, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2019

LITERARY FICTION

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THINGS FALL APART

by Chinua Achebe ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 23, 1958

This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.

Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.

Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger .

Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958

ISBN: 0385474547

Page Count: 207

Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky

Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958

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by Chinua Achebe

THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.

Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992

ISBN: 1400031702

Page Count: 592

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992

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by Donna Tartt

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By Josh Duboff

• Published Oct. 25, 2019 Updated Oct. 28, 2019

FIND ME By André Aciman

It is very difficult for any sequel to please everyone, the devotees of the original all clamoring for their various fantasies for the central characters. And this challenge is only compounded when that original has been adapted into a hugely successful film, the sort that spawns a flood of think pieces, viral memes and illustrated tributes.

Such is certainly the case for the sequel to André Aciman’s 2007 novel, “Call Me by Your Name,” the source material for the Oscar-nominated 2017 Luca Guadagnino film, which starred Timothée Chalamet falling for Armie Hammer in the lush Italian countryside and inspired a new wave of readership for the decade-old novel. (Feel free to Google “Elio and Oliver peach scene” to get a sense of the obsession.)

The structure of Aciman’s sequel, “Find Me,” is likely to disappoint those who’ve been eagerly waiting to find out what has become of Elio, the earnest teenage piano prodigy, and his summer guest, Oliver, an older, strapping American philosophy student of his father’s. The first half of the new book concerns neither of these two lovers, and is told entirely from the perspective of Elio’s now-divorced father, Samuel, as he finds himself infatuated with a much younger woman he meets on a train.

Aciman has already demonstrated his skill at portraying the terrifying and overwhelming experience of a romantic crush — the lust and violence and unease of it all — and this first section reminded me of a different European-set film, “Before Sunrise,” as Miranda and Sami wander around Rome deep in conversation, sharing stories and secrets. But even with the discomforting dynamic of their age difference, it’s hard to read this section without feeling impatient for our leading men to take the stage.

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Find Me, the Call Me By Your Name sequel, is tender, melancholy, and deeply flawed

In André Aciman’s new novel, Elio and Oliver reunite at last. Eventually.

by Constance Grady

Call Me By Your Name is a book that throbs with desire. André Aciman’s 2007 novel (and the basis for the 2017 film of the same title ) is a portrait of adolescent love and lust, experienced for the first time with an intensity that’s almost frightening in how all-consuming it feels. And Aciman devotes himself to chronicling every fleeting fantasy, every caress, with a fervor that matches what his characters are feeling.

Find Me , Aciman’s new sequel to Call Me By Your Name , is gentler and more melancholy than its predecessor. It’s not about first love but about true love, and specifically true love that is marred by lives lived out of sync. It’s about loving someone at exactly the wrong moment in time and finding your way through everything that follows regardless.

Elio and Oliver, the lovers from Call Me By Your Name , are the couple at the heart of Find Me , just as they were the heart of the earlier book. Their connection was both first love and true love, and the fact that their parting was a matter of timing is what gives Find Me its thematic weight: Their romance came at the wrong time — Elio was 17 and Oliver 24, and shortly after they said goodbye Oliver decided to marry a woman — and now both of them are living with the consequences.

But it takes a long time for Aciman to find his way back to Elio and Oliver. Find Me is a four-act book, and the first and longest act — set 10 years after the events of Call Me By Your Name — is about Elio’s father Samuel and his budding romance with a woman named Miranda who is half his age. Elio takes over as the point-of-view character in the second act after a five-year time jump, and Oliver in the third after another time jump. However, it’s not until the fourth act that the two lovers are finally reunited.

That delay is effective at building tension. But it’s also frustrating, because it means we spend a lot of time with Samuel and Miranda as Aciman hammers home his chosen themes. And Samuel and Miranda are not particularly interesting characters.

Almost all of Aciman’s characters talk like horny philosophy textbooks. Sometimes it works better than others.

Samuel and Miranda spend most of their time on the page together navigating the age gap between them, and it’s clear that for Aciman, that gap is not incidental. It’s a key to the theme of Find Me : Samuel and Miranda have met each other at the wrong moment in time, because for most of Samuel’s life, Miranda either was not born or was too young, and so although they were meant for one another their circumstances kept them apart, and now they will have only the end of Samuel’s life together.

It’s a romantic notion, and Aciman writes it in his most exalted, lyrical prose, letting his characters pile one destiny-driven vow on top of another in cascading sentences: “There will be no sorrow from me, and none from you,” Samuel tells Miranda, “because you’ll know as I’ll know that whatever time you’ve given me, my entire life, from childhood, school years, university, my years as a professor, a writer, and all the rest that happened was all leading up to you.”

But the age difference between them also means Aciman is doubling down on the age gap between Elio and Oliver in Call Me By Your Name , which was significant enough to cause a controversy during the film adaptation’s Oscar campaign. And the age difference feels all the more pointed in Find Me , because where Elio and Oliver were fully distinct characters with coherent psychologies and opposing points of view, Miranda and Samuel exist only as shallow outlines: Samuel represents wise and cosmopolitan age and Miranda is his perfect reflection in a young and vigorous body. That is the dynamic that Aciman seems interested in to the exclusion of all else, and the second time he writes it, it’s less convincing than the first.

Because Samuel and Miranda aren’t real characters, when they settle into the quasi-symposium that in Aciman’s worldview is the natural prelude to sex, their rapport doesn’t quite ring true. Which is surprising, because usually those symposiums work for Aciman even when they shouldn’t.

Nearly all of Aciman’s characters speak in philosophical paragraphs that aren’t meant to resemble normal human speech patterns so much as create an opportunity for Aciman to throw ideas around: In Aciman’s novels, discourse is what creates the possibility for sex, so sex is always both preceded and followed by debates about eros and art and the body.

And Aciman generally writes those debates with an endearing disregard for the rules of psychological realism like “show don’t tell.” With the occasional exception of Oliver, all of Aciman’s characters know exactly how they feel at any given moment and are more than happy to explain it to one another in exacting, precise detail. Those explanations rarely feel realistic, but when Oliver and Elio were delivering them to each other in both Call Me By Your Name and toward the end of Find Me , they were so drenched in emotion that I was more than willing to go along for the ride.

But the emotion never quite comes through with Samuel and Miranda, because Aciman hasn’t made the effort to turn them into more than flat types. As a result, their symposiums feel like just that: symposiums, without the undercurrent of love and desire and fear that made Elio and Oliver’s symposiums so compelling.

Things improve slightly in Find Me ’s second act, when Elio takes center stage as the point-of-view character, bringing with him an air of self-deprecation that goes a long way toward making all of his speechifying palatable. He’s now in his 30s, and in a continuation of the age difference theme, he’s falling in love with a man who is twice his age.

Elio’s new partner is named Michel, and he is the only person in Elio’s life who can compare to Oliver: “There’s only been the two of you,” Elio tells Michel. “All the others were occasionals. You have given me days that justify the years I’ve been without him.” Both Michel and Elio know that Oliver is Elio’s true love, but in the 15 years since Call Me By Your Name , Elio has been able to live his life openly and unapologetically enough to find a runner-up second love.

Oliver, who finally makes his first appearance in the third act, has not been so lucky. Because he chose to reject Elio and with Elio his true self, he hasn’t been able to make an authentic connection with anyone since their parting 20 years ago. He is amicable with his wife because they make a good team, and he half-heartedly pursues trysts with friends of both genders. But when a house guest plays for him the same piano piece that Elio played for him in Call Me By Your Name , Oliver is overcome with memories of Elio. “I knew,” he thinks, “that some arcane and beguiling wording was being spoken about what my life had been, and might still be, or might never be, and that the choice rested on the keyboard itself and me.”

It’s in Oliver’s storyline that Find Me delivers its most achingly lovely passages, because Oliver is the only one of Aciman’s characters who is capable of self-deception, who does not always know immediately and instinctively which of his feelings to trust and how to give voice to them. That makes Oliver’s arc a tragedy, but it also means that only in his narration are multiple layers of emotion allowed to exist and mingle moodily on the page together.

It takes until the novel’s fourth and final act for Oliver and Elio to finally meet on the page in a tender, lyrical epilogue that is the culmination of all the meditation on wasted time that came before. Since all Aciman’s readers really want is to see Oliver and Elio together again, all that came before this reunion made for a frustrating and occasionally clumsy wait — but the payoff makes you feel every bit of the years of separation both characters had to live through, waiting for their lives to sync up once again.

And as the pair comes together, Aciman’s prose is no longer filled with the all-consuming passion that animated Call Me By Your Name . Instead, he narrates their encounter with a sweetness and tentativeness that fits this gentle, melancholy book.

“Time,” says Oliver, and Elio understands “that what he’d meant was that too much time had gone by.” But soon, Elio realizes that “despite two decades we were not a day older than the two young men we’d been so long ago.”

What makes Find Me work, when it does work, is that it allows you to feel both of those concepts at once: Time goes by, terrible and insurmountable — and also it doesn’t matter at all.

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Andre aciman’s ‘call me by your name’ sequel ‘find me’: book review.

THR review: Andre Aciman’s 'Call Me by Your Name’ Sequel ‘Find Me,’ follow-up to the beloved queer romance (adapted into an Oscar-winning film in 2017), picks up more than a decade after the events of the first novel.

By Kevin Sessums

Kevin Sessums

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How to begin when you have already experienced an ending? 

That was the question I asked myself when confronted with the imperative sentence that is the title of Andre Aciman’s follow-up novel — OK, sequel — to his best-selling Call Me by Your Name (2007). The preening appreciation of many Call Me by Your Name readers borders on the cult-like, and they have for months expressed a mixture of measured anticipation and possessive concern that this sequel, Find Me , will, in fact, find them disappointed by the continuation of the first novel’s story about the affair between a 17-year-old boy and a young man of 24. That affair allowed Aciman to preen a bit himself with his knowledge of Greek literature and philosophy and music, as well as the enticing geography of both the verdant northern regions of Italy and the virile southern regions of the male body. He also got to write about a peach.

The acclaimed 2017 film based on Call Me by Your Name was, to me, an improvement on the source material. The keen-eyed screenwriter James Ivory rightfully won an Oscar for gleaning a more stringent strain of love story from the gloss-and-dross of Aciman’s prose, which has a geography all its own filled with isthmuses of metaphors and olive groves of allusions with alas neither an inland nor an inside leg left for irony.

That much-needed irony, even a whiff of ennobling wit, was found in the lovely performances of Timothée Chalamet as Elio and Michael Stuhlbarg as his father, Samuel, a deeply empathetic archeology professor — as well as Armie Hammer as Oliver, Samuel’s graduate assistant, who visits the family at their Italian compound that enchanted summer and not only reshapes their lives, but also, ultimately, it seems, their very concept of time. 

That’s a whole lot of reshaping to shove into the mighty allure of one character. But just as Hammer transcended what was, to my eye, his miscasting, Aciman’s prose transcends its own grand neediness for knowledge and all that knowledge cannot know when distilled into another imperative sentence issued as an unspoken, unwritten admonition from both books: the Delphic maxim, “Know Thyself.” Elio and Oliver indeed know themselves more deeply for having known and loved each other.

Luca Guadagnino, the director of the film, found a way to navigate the story with a swooning kind of poise that eludes Aciman, with all his swanning and swerving. In Find Me , the author is still flaunting that way he has found to allow a story to occur in the temporal musings that swarm the mind — delighted by its own education and erudition — rather than in linear time’s own stricter, less bemused demands. Yet I sometimes find the swanning and swerving more maddening than masterly. I often long to stop it in its expensively shod tracks in order to scrape the academic mud from the Wellingtons in which Aciman strikes a pose, for example, in this sequel’s second section. That stretch of the novel strands us in the French countryside with Elio, who now teaches piano in Paris about 15 years after the first book began, and a new male lover, a much older lawyer named Michel.

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But even with all the epistemological falderal, these two books are, at their hearts, highfalutin romance novels. That is their deep and understandable appeal, and their undying folly. If Greek-Egyptian poet Constantine Cavafy had experienced literary coitus with English romance novelist Barbara Cartland, the result would have been something like Call Me by Your Name and Find Me .

Find Me  begins with a resurrection. Elio’s father, Samuel, has died by the end of the first book, but in the opening section of the new novel he is very much alive. On a train to Rome to meet up with Elio, Samuel meets a young woman named Miranda in the compartment they share along with her dog. It is a decade before the ending of the first book; Samuel is more than a decade older than this woman, who takes him to her enfeebled-though-still-fabulous father’s place for lunch when they arrive in Rome after much flirtatious badinage flutters between them, a veritable aviary of deflection and desire. 

Samuel and Miranda fall into bed and madly in love in a hoary whirlwind of messy sheets and florid writing. Aciman actually describes Miranda’s vagina as feeling as if it were a ripened fig opening onto Samuel’s penis as she lowers herself onto it; Miranda, when it’s her turn, describes Samuel’s erect penis as her “lighthouse.”

That word choice made me think of Virginia Woolf’s novel To the Lighthouse , which had its own sectioned structure, the second of which is titled “Time Passes.” Find Me ’s plot, like Woolf’s, is also but an adjunct to its more deeply felt philosophical musings about love, absence and death. (It’s a close call as to which I find more audacious: Woolf’s technique in achieving multiple focalizations in To the Lighthouse or Samuel’s lighthouse and its technique in achieving for Miranda, one presumes, multiple orgasms. Facetious? Not really. This is Aciman’s literary lane — a byway of soft shoulders, hard bodies and surprising intersections where the wolfish and the Woolf-like collide.  Reading him is much like rubbernecking at such collisions.)

Elio and the much older Michel fall in love as quickly in the second section as Miranda and the much older Samuel do in the first. This is a novel about the stirrings of father fixations as much as it is about fate’s steering mechanism in the making of the narrative of lives, loves and novels. The lovemaking of Elio and Michel is rendered with a kind of tender resolve that borders on treacle; it’s all rather quaint and queer, in every sense of that latter word, especially compared with the first section in which Samuel and Miranda boff with abandon. 

The sections of Find Me are titled with the annotations of musical composition. The first is called “Tempo,” and has a pace that is rather startling, jump-starting the book with Miranda’s jaunty air pushing back against Samuel’s jaundiced one. The section is filled with the wondrous smell of her.

The novel’s second part “Cadenza” — which, in music, denotes a solo passage of virtuosic talent (Elio may be performing a duet with Michel, but it feels like a solo) — has not the smell of flesh but of emollients lining the shower and shelves in Michel’s country estate, as well as of the soaps he uses on Elio’s naked body as he insists Elio keep his eyes closed. That encounter makes for a rather creepy scene that is, one presumes, supposed to be about adoration and trust but instead reminds one of a father giving his child a bath.

The third section of Find Me is titled “Capriccio,” which, musically, connotes something improvised and brief — and in painting means that there are facets of fantasy present, and one must ferret out what is real and what is imagined. This part of the novel catches up with Oliver, now a father of two grown sons, and his wife, Micol, as he is finishing up a teaching sabbatical from his school in New Hampshire. He has spent the sabbatical in New York City, where he has been lecturing on the pre-Socratics, whose inquiry was based on the natural world.

The section centers on Oliver yet again departing — specifically on a going-away party for his wife and him at which Oliver moons over two guests he has invited: a young gay colleague at the New York City university and a young woman who stretches on a neighboring mat at his yoga class. The section is infused with the fluidity of Oliver’s bisexuality, as well the internal dialogues he is having with the idealized Elio, each still trying to find himself in the ether of time and the either of the other. 

We are informed that the gay colleague has been working on a book about the Russian pianist Samuil Feinberg. And thus he sits down at the old Steinway during the party’s denouement — as well as the book’s — and begins to play Bach’s achingly beautiful “Arioso,” which is what Elio had played during that other long-ago departure that still underscores Oliver’s musings.

The current objects of Oliver’s desire — the pianist who has served his purpose (and the author’s) and the afterthought of a yoga partner, the latest stand-in for the parameters that women have offered Oliver in a kind of purloined life — exit the party and Oliver is left with his wife. She heads to bed. No boffing with abandon for them; not even the treacle of reticence. Oliver stays behind to clean up and descries, no longer mooning over others, the moon itself outside noticing him with its accusatory fullness, this professor closing in on 50 who forms public notions about the natural world within the context of classical thought — and private notions about it within the context of his memories of an idyllic Italy. 

“Music is no more than the sound of our regrets put to a cadence that stirs the illusion of pleasure and hope,” Bach says in another of Oliver’s internal dialogues, speaking to him amid the deafening silence of the life he has chosen even as the life that once chose him — and which he rejected — refuses to remain unheard. It beckons him through Bach to find it again. “It’s the surest reminder that we’re here for a very short while and that we’ve neglected or cheated or, worse yet, failed to live our lives. Music is the unlived life,” the composer explains. “You’ve lived the wrong life, my friend,” says Bach, “and almost defaced the one you were given to live.”

“What do I want?” asks Oliver. “Do you know the answer, Herr Bach? Is there such a thing as a right or wrong life?”

“I’m an artist, my friend,” Bach says. “I don’t do answers. Artists know questions only.”

In Find Me ’s final section, called “Da Capo” — a musical term that means “back to the beginning” or, translated literally, “from the head” — we are transported, in essence, to the ending of Call Me by Your Name . Oliver is back in Italy with Elio. There are still, however, a few unanswered questions.

But as for the answer to the question posed at the beginning of this review — How to begin when you have already experienced an ending? — I would suggest you read some Cavafy and Woolf. Skip the Cartland. Listen to Bach while reading Aciman’s sentences, which can be maddening but adhere hauntingly to the rhythms of Bach’s brilliant clarity when you expect them instead to vault into the realm of Vivaldi ruined by Liberace.

More important, listen deeply to the longing of your own heart and its own language while reading Aciman’s. Allow them to coalesce. Continue to read. Continue to love. Continue to find yourself. Call yourself by your own damn name. 

Kevin Sessums was a contributing editor of Vanity Fair  for 14 years, where he wrote 28 cover stories and over 300 articles. He has authored two New York Times  best-selling memoirs, Mississippi Sissy  and I Left It on the Mountain , and is currently the editor and publisher of sessumsMagazine.com.

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BookBrowse Reviews Find Me by Andre Aciman

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• Oct 29, 2019, 272 pages
• Aug 2020, 272 pages

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André Aciman provides snapshots from the stories of Elio, Oliver and Samuel ten years after the events of Call Me by Your Name in this sequel with broad appeal as a standalone.

In Call Me by Your Name , first published in 2007, André Aciman introduced Elio, an adolescent boy living with his family in the Italian Riviera, and Oliver, the charming graduate student houseguest with whom he falls in love. The book charts their passionate affair and concludes with a bittersweet crescendo; a tricky ending to expand into a sequel without sacrificing the perfect balance of realism and romanticism that caused Call Me by Your Name to resonate with so many readers.  Find Me not only rises to that challenge but exceeds it. While a prior attachment to these characters is arguably necessary to get the full emotional payoff of the sequel, it could otherwise be read as a standalone; knowledge of the first book's plot is not essential. Find Me reads like a frenzied fairytale; it's every bit as indulgent and beguiling as its predecessor, though it asks more of its readers' patience. Anyone picking it up hungry to dive back into Elio and Oliver's story will first have to abide a detour through a novella-length chapter about Elio's father, Samuel, who meets a charismatic young woman, Miranda, on a train to Rome. Set ten years after the events of Call Me By Your Name , it's an opening that suggests this book might eschew the youthful headiness of Aciman's previous novel—the narrator is much older, and the conversation that unfolds between Samuel and Miranda is at first measured and guarded. However, their chance meeting escalates into something intense and ardent as they engage in a mutually idyllic love affair that slowly but surely pulls the reader back into the throes of passion reminiscent of the affair between Elio and Oliver. Though this chapter isn't the most natural segue from the ending of the previous book, it ties up a loose end for one of the more subtly tragic characters, and also charts the thematic course for what's to follow. The existence of fate is a question that dogs each of the characters through their narratives. Samuel and Miranda, for example, wonder how they might have gone on with their mundane lives if they hadn't spoken to each other on the train. Samuel's passionate desire to reclaim the love and lust that were lost from his life mirrors Elio's own melancholic journey, searching in all his prospective partners for the spark that was ignited by Oliver. Find Me isn't so much about moving forward as it is about moving back in time, recreating lost passion, reigniting lost flames. Subsequent to Samuel and Miranda's story, which only touches the periphery of Elio's, we finally get to revisit Call Me by Your Name 's chief protagonists—first Elio, then Oliver. Each of the novel's four chapters is shorter than the one that came before, each a dizzying vignette that chronicles a brief period of the character's adulthood, laying out their overarching dissatisfaction that stems from aching for a relationship that ended over a decade ago. This isn't the kind of wish-fulfilling sequel where the long-lost lovers fall into each other's arms on the second page and carry out a fantasy of a relationship, and it's destined to disappoint anyone who expects that of it. Instead, Aciman revisits these characters in order to ask deeper questions of his readers. Can the euphoria of first love ever be recreated? Is it worth sacrificing something sturdy to chase after something fleeting? Was what Elio and Oliver had in Call Me By Your Name any less real simply because it was so brief? Find Me is perhaps more contemplative than its predecessor, but ultimately no less enchanting, and arguably even more affecting. The unhappiness, emotional distance, and unspent desire that these characters must first grapple with in order to attain closure makes the conclusion all the more gratifying.

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Find Me by André Aciman review – an intriguing sequel to Call Me by Your Name

Chance encounters hint at great romance, and Oliver dreams of Elio, in a stylised yet frustratingly unrealistic novel of love

I n Richard Linklater’s film Before Sunrise , two strangers meet on a train, strike up a conversation and soon find themselves wandering around Vienna, intoxicated by each other’s presence and recognising that from a chance encounter a great romance might have begun. Find Me is a sequel to Call Me By Your Name , André Aciman’s 2007 novel that became an Oscar-winning film, and it begins in the same way as Linklater’s movie, but rather than the protagonists being a couple of twentysomethings, Samuel and Miranda have a greater disparity between their ages. The former, the father of the young pianist Elio from the earlier novel, is at least 30 years older than the latter.

It’s a brave conceit in 2019, when any suggestion of impropriety between an older man and a younger woman is generally given short shrift, but there’s no touching or hand-holding here, no lewd comments or sexual innuendo. Instead, the pair engage in a long and erudite conversation that leads them to spending the day together and waiting no more than a few hours to agree that theirs is the greatest love affair since Orpheus first set eyes on Eurydice.

Having read much of Aciman’s work, I find his writing intriguing and maddening in equal parts. While the elegance of his prose and the sophistication of his characters are to be admired, his creations rarely seem human, speaking in a pompous fashion where everyone, regardless of age or circumstance, is intimately familiar with classical music and philosophy. Love lies at the heart of his books, but as a concept rather than a reality. No one in an Aciman novel can ever just go on a few dates and see how things work out. Instead they know from their first interaction that they’re destined to be together, revelling in the authenticity of their affections. Ultimately, it does not make them seem evolved but narcissistic, shallow and a little immature.

The same problems weakened his previous novel, Enigma Variations , where the central character Paul fell in love with five different people across the story, declaring each one to be the great love of his life before chucking them in favour of the next. Here, Samuel and Miranda are planning their future together before the guard has even checked their tickets. In fact, within hours of meeting, the pair discuss having children, buy monogrammed mugs, consider getting matching tattoos and she introduces him to her father. I’m as romantic as the next guy but there’s a fine line between passion and recklessness. “Is this going too fast for you?” Miranda asks him, and it’s a fair question. It’s going too fast for me and I’m not even in the relationship.

Find Me is structured in three sections, each one shorter than the last. The second concerns the burgeoning relationship between Elio and a much older man, Michel, whom he meets at a concert. The conversations and the romance play out in much the same way as they do between Samuel and Miranda, with a neat line about the ageing lotharios eventually having to compete over who is the younger. Elio and Michel speak for the first time during the concert’s intermission and by the time the musicians have gathered for the second act, they too are besotted, expressing sentiments of love that might sound excessive on a wedding day. Novels don’t have to reflect real life, they can elevate the quotidian into something heightened and beautiful, but if the reader wants to shout, “Oh grow up, you’ve only just met!” at the characters, then something’s gone awry.

The final and shortest section features Oliver, the previous great love of Elio’s life, who is now deeply in love with several other people but dreaming that the young pianist’s hands are still tickling his ivories. Fans of Call Me By Your Name will have to wait patiently until the coda of Find Me to see the lovers actually meet.

It’s annoying to feel such frustration with a writer who is as gifted a stylist as Aciman, and whose work is centred around that most basic of human needs, love. Characters in a novel should never feel like characters in a novel and too often here, they do. This is a shame considering his preoccupations are relatable and his descriptions of Rome and life on the continent are beautifully drawn, as evocative as anything you might find in EM Forster . But honestly, if one of these characters ended up in a train carriage with me and tried to start a conversation, I’d grab my things and go in search of an empty seat.

Find Me is published by Faber (£14.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com . Free UK p&p on all online orders over £15.

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• Answering All Your Burning Questions About the <em>Call Me By Your Name</em> Sequel, <em>Find Me</em>

Answering All Your Burning Questions About the Call Me By Your Name Sequel, Find Me

T welve years after the release of André Aciman’s modern queer classic Call Me By Your Name , the author has done what once seemed impossible to him: he’s written a follow-up. Readers have long wondered what happens to Elio and Oliver after the summer they fall in love in the Italian countryside — particularly since the 2017 film adaptation starring Timothée Chalamet and Armie Hammer turned the story into a phenomenon — and Aciman is finally ready to provide answers.

But Aciman says that Find Me , coming Oct. 29, is not an “obvious sequel.” In an exclusive interview with TIME , the author explains why he chose to enter the story not through Elio or Oliver but instead through Elio’s father Samuel. Find Me does not simply continue where Call Me By Your Name left off — the new book’s dialogue-heavy vignettes fill in gaps left in the final chapter of the original, which flashed forward into brief scenes of the 20 years after Elio and Oliver’s intimate summer. A book that muses on big themes of love, fate and the effects of time, Find Me provides a lot to discover between the lines. Aciman answered all our biggest questions about the Call Me By Your Name sequel.

Why did Aciman finally decide to write a sequel?

It had something to do with Aciman finally writing a follow-up that satisfied him after years of trying, and something to do with his meeting a stranger on a train in 2016. A woman asked him to watch her dog while she stepped away, and he found himself crafting a scene around her. That scene became the opening of Find Me , with Samuel finding himself drawn to a woman half his age on a train to visit Elio in Rome.

But mostly, Aciman reinvested because Elio and Oliver never left him. “I love the characters,” he tells TIME. “It was wonderful to spend time with them when they were younger and it’s still wonderful to be with them again and to find [years later] they really haven’t gotten much older.”

Elio was the narrator of the first book; is Find Me also told from his point of view?

In some sections, yes. The book is split into four chapters, the first two taking up the lion’s share of pages. Elio’s longer section is the second; his father Samuel handles the first (titled “Tempo”). Samuel provided an emotional crescendo in Call Me By Your Name (as well as the film adaption) with his monologue expressing total acceptance of his son’s love for another man. Aciman explains that there were certain thematic beats he wanted to hit before handing the mic to Elio.

“I needed to get a lot of things set up, particularly the discussion about the fact that we are not in sync with either time or life itself,” he says. The book starts 10 years after the events of the first novel, with the conversation between a now-divorced Samuel and Miranda, the woman on the train. Their discussion chugs along at a speed to match the locomotive, and it becomes clearer and clearer that romance is brewing.

Chapter Two (“Cadenza”) presents the age dynamic in reverse, as Elio tells of his infatuation in France with a man at least twice his age named Michel. Chapter Three (“Capriccio”) touches base with Oliver in New York, and Elio returns in the book’s closing chapter, “Da Capo.”

Wait, wasn’t Samuel still married 10 years after Elio and Oliver’s summer?

Yes, Call Me By Your Name superfans might recall that when Oliver returns to the house he stayed in that magical summer 11 years later, there is no indication that Elio’s parents have split up.

“It happens,” Aciman says of the narrative discrepancy. “You just don’t do the math — you go with what you think.” Whatever Samuel was in Call Me By Your Name , he is indeed single when we meet him again in Find Me .

What happens with Oliver in Find Me?

Aciman has previously talked about Oliver being hard for him to access , telling Vulture, “I don’t know who he is. I’ve never been in his head.” But he shifts easily into Oliver’s perspective for the first time in the sequel. “He got older,” Aciman says. When Find Me catches up with Oliver, after a few time shifts, he’s around 40 years old. “He’s the kind of guy who says, ‘I used to be able to do this. What happened to me?’” Aciman says. “He’s basically realizing he’s no longer the prime candidate in other people’s lives. Other people have their own lives, their own partners, and they’re not going to give them up for him.” Aciman describes Oliver as facing questions about the life he has lived and how he thinks about his own character. “When someone has some kind of internal hurdle,” the author says, “then I can understand them.”

Aciman is big on intergenerational romance, isn’t he?

Indeed, at least in this literary universe. The age differences between lovers in Find Me almost feel like Aciman is doubling down in response to the (relatively minimal) criticism Call Me By Your Name received for portraying a love affair between a 17-year-old and a 24-year-old. That said, everyone in Find Me is grown up — just some more than others.

“For an older person, a person who’s significantly younger is always filled with energy, with promise,” Aciman says. Miranda is in her 30s, while Samuel is in his late 50s or early 60s, and Aciman sees them each providing something the other needs. “She brings a degree of energy that he doesn’t have,” he says. “On the other hand, he brings a sense of distance and equanimity and reason and wisdom.”

While Aciman says he is sensitive to the criticism of the first book, he doesn’t necessarily agree with it. “That’s the novel that came into my head and that’s how I wrote it,” he says. “It was also a very, very, very consensual relationship.”

Why are the chapter titles in Find Me musical terms?

Aciman is a deep admirer of classical music. He tells TIME he wanted to use musical terms “Tempo,” “Cadenza,” “Capriccio” and “Da Capo” to underline the theme of music throughout the novel. Elio has grown up to be an accomplished pianist and the owner of an encyclopedic knowledge of the art form.

“I wanted to say that classical music is a way of partitioning the lives of these people,” he says. His characters not only love classical music, but also have the cosmopolitan sophistication and a musical way of speaking that evokes it. “These people have lives that could be, in theory, seen from the vantage point of classical music. It gives a certain coherence to everything about them.”

Will the Call Me By Your Name sequel be made into a film?

Fans are eager for a second film — and Chalamet himself has said he and Hammer are “1000% in.” Luca Guadagnino, the director of the Call Me By Your Name film, has spoken about writing a sequel that prominently features the AIDS crisis. The filmmaker tells TIME that he would like to meet with Aciman, who collaborated with him on the original film, to discuss combining their visions.

Didn’t Elio and Oliver part ways for good at the first book’s conclusion? Are we being set up for more heartbreak?

Aciman has a coy answer for this most burning of questions about the Call Me By Your Name sequel. “At the end of Call Me By Your Name , everybody assumes that they’re separating,” Aciman says. “I didn’t say that. I said this is what might happen. I might take him to the door of the car and say goodbye to him.” Aciman reminds us that these lines are all in Elio’s head, so nothing is definite.

Find Me suggests in all manner of ways that good things come to those who wait.

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Book review: Find Me, by André Aciman

Nevertheless, he had a great success a few years ago with Call Me by Your Name, the story of a love affair between Elio, a boy of 17, and Oliver, a man eight or ten years older. It was later successfully filmed.


Elio and Oliver reappear in his new novel, though for the long first section of the book Elio, now a concert pianist, is a subsidiary character and Oliver is off stage.

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It begins with an encounter on a train from Florence to Rome . The narrator is Samuel, Elio’s father, a historian and art critic. He is on his way to deliver a lecture on the Fall of Constantinople and to meet Elio when he begins a conversation with a young woman, Miranda, who is on her weekly visit to her elderly father. They fall into a probing and revealing exchange. Rather daringly, in view of today’s concerns, Aciman gives us an autumn and spring romance. It begins with talk that is both enquiring and revealing; in his novels people say what in real life they are perhaps more likely only to think, a criticism often made of the Wilson and Murdoch novels Aciman’s recall. When Samuel gets a message from Elio postponing their meeting, Miranda invites him to come with her to her father’s apartment for lunch.They stop off at the market in Campo de’ Fiori, nostalgically described, and in the afternoon they wander through Rome, visiting old haunts and talking, and talking. Eventually of course they will do more than talk and when Elio joins them the next day, he will be delighted to see his father rejuvenated and in love. Rome is beautifully evoked. Love for the city nurtures the love developing between Samuel and Miranda.


Elio is the narrator of the second section set in Paris , where he will have an affair with an older man, while still longing for Oliver, who is given his voice in the third section set first in America. He had been married, is a father, but readers who loved the earlier novel will want to know if he and Elio come together again. They must read the book to find out, though the title is suggestive.


There are dark family memories of the fate of Europe’s Jews, and the Paris scenes are set in autumn turning to winter – perhaps the most poignantly Parisian of seasons when cobblestones are slippery and mist rises from the Seine, but for the most part this beautifully-written novel is suffused with a golden, early autumnal light.


The theme is the need for love, the necessity of love. “Love is easy,” Samuel tells Elio, “it’s the courage to love and trust that matters, and not all of us have both… I’ve taught you how to earmark moments when time stops, but these moments mean very little unless they’re echoed in someone you love. Otherwise they stay in you and either fester all through your life or, if you’re lucky – and very few are – you’re able to pass them on in something called art, in your case music.” Or, one may say, in Aciman’s own case, the art of fiction.


Aciman takes pleasure in his characters, cares for them and invites readers to do so too. He is out of tune with the spirit of our time, for he believes in the transforming power of love, and writes of joy and heartache with tender sympathy. Like so many novelists today he teaches in a university, in his case “comparative literature” to graduate students in New York. I would think them fortunate.  Allan Massie



 Find Me, by André Aciman, Faber & Faber, 260pp, £14.99   


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“Find Me” Is a Shallow Sequel to “Call Me By Your Name”

The novel “ Call Me by Your Name ,” by André Aciman, was published in 2007 and adapted into a movie in 2017. It conjured a swoony romance between two young men, Elio and Oliver, in an Italian seaside town. Then it ended in heartbreak as gentle as the sun slipping beneath the sea. The book established Aciman as a poet of the drunken senses; this magazine described him as an “ acute grammarian of desire .” The film, which grossed 41.9 million dollars at the global box office, seduced both viewers and critics, who declared it “ravishing,” “a lush and vibrant masterpiece.”

Luca Guadagnino, the movie’s director, and Timothée Chalamet, one of its stars, were rumored to be among the many people clamoring for a sequel to the source text. That sequel has arrived, in the form of “ Find Me ,” Aciman’s new novel. The book picks up a decade or so after the main action of “Call Me by Your Name,” with Samuel, Elio’s father, on a train to Rome to visit his son, who has become a classical pianist. En route, Samuel meets a twentysomething woman with whom he conducts an affair. The perspective switches to Elio, who remains haunted by memories of Oliver while pursuing Michel, a lawyer nearly twice his age, and to Oliver, now a professor in the United States, who is throwing a party with his wife and lusting after two guests. Then it’s back to Elio, in a coda that doesn’t so much sink softly under the waves as crash, like a drunk on a scooter, into the beachside ice-cream stand.

The longest section belongs to Samuel and his paramour, Miranda. Miranda is model-gorgeous but dressed carelessly; her demeanor is a mix of wryness, impetuousness, and tenderness. She takes black-and-white photographs and makes forgettable observations that prompt Samuel to marvel at her brilliance. The admiration is mutual. Within twenty-four hours of meeting Samuel, Miranda is sobbing in his bed, entreating him to have her baby (“I want it from you and no one else—even if we never see each other after this weekend”), and offering to tattoo a lighthouse (she calls his penis “my lighthouse”) onto her genitals. Samuel, meanwhile, is a divorced scholar who believes that he has missed his chance at love; he’s quick with what are received, within the world of the book, as acute remarks, unless he’s post-coitally outsourcing his eloquence to the German Romantics. (“ ‘Where did they invent you?’ I said when we were resting. What I meant to say was I didn’t know what life was before this. So I quoted Goethe again.”)

These characters are so unreal—she a wet dream, he a cipher—that any specificity at all becomes embarrassing, as if Aciman were revealing his particular turn-ons. And yet we continue to be served details, often through Miranda’s hero worship. This points to a bigger problem with the book: since all of the narrators are in love and interact mainly with their lovers, the only opinions we ever hear expressed about these people are sweaty and rapturous. The result is a novel that feels besotted with its characters despite scant evidence of their charms. The sex writing itself is unfortunate. If Samuel’s penis is a lighthouse, Miranda’s vagina, we’re told, is a fig. “This is who we’ll be,” Miranda promises, “all cum and juices.” Never has a whirlwind romance felt so interminable.

The second section, about Elio and Michel, reprises the May-December dyad. The two men meet at a classical-music concert and begin to flirt, probe, and speak wistfully about their fathers, who taught them music. Michel’s used to sneak downstairs and play the piano at night; Michel learned to say, in the morning, that he’d dreamed that the piano had played itself. Is this plangent or preposterous? (What person thinks that his family won’t notice him practicing the piano while they’re trying to sleep?) Michel maintains a civil yet distant relationship with his own son, which pains him, because he longs for someone with whom he can reminisce warmly about his dad. But perhaps Elio can fulfill that function. The overlapping male bonds, the echoing motifs—a hand placed on a face, the older lover “holding back”—hint at Aciman’s formal ambition, as he drops hints about “destiny” and the looping nature of time. “Fate,” says Michel, with the book’s characteristic subtlety, “has strange ways of teasing us with patterns.” But it’s hard to appreciate the magic of coincidence when Aciman has lined up all these details himself.

The Oliver section is likewise seeded with defective epiphanies. Oliver finds himself drawn to two party guests, a man and a woman. In fact, he is drawn to the Elio in them; together, they add up to the boy he left behind. (“I couldn’t care a whit about their lives,” he reflects.) As Oliver submits to a fantasy of Elio, of his “impish laugh” and “jeering languor,” Aciman again seems to be positing something like the fungibility of all people who fall outside the bounds of a lover’s narcissism. The book wants to show that people can finish each other’s stories: that Elio might serve as Michel’s estranged son, or that Oliver’s guests might stand in for Elio. This instrumentalization is meant to feel poignant, but it comes off as callous. Consider Samuel and Miranda in their hotel’s breakfast area:

The personnel dressed in white jackets the next morning were busy confabulating and joking with one another while cheesy loud music was playing in the background. “I hate background music and I hate their yapping,” [Miranda] said, indicating the help. She did not hesitate in turning around to one of the waiters. . . . Right away they got quiet. “I’ve grown to hate this hotel,” I said, “but I come here each time I’m in Rome because of the balcony attached to my room. On warm days, I love sitting under the umbrella to read. Later in the evening I have drinks with friends either on my balcony or in the larger terrace upstairs above the third floor. It’s simply heavenly there.”

The scene traps all of “Find Me” in amber. A glimmer of the outside world is shushed to make room for drivel about one’s leisure habits. Aciman relays the reprimanding of the help in the same spirit with which he describes Miranda’s beauty or Samuel’s discernment—that is, as a sign of character. Aciman wants us to approve of his sweethearts so that we can participate in their co-enchantment. This worked in his previous novel. The leads in “Call Me by Your Name” were self-conscious and soulful, but they also scanned as sweet and curious; theirs was the insufferability of youth. Their universality, too, formed part of their appeal: precisely drawn, with delicately shaded interactions, the Elio and Oliver of 2007 made for a convincing portrait of first love. That universality has fled from “Find Me,” which feels alternately too vague, too offensive, and too ridiculous to do anything but place one’s empathic imagination on a rack until one surrenders to one’s own contempt.

Yet it is fellow feeling that these lovers seem to desire above all. Aciman’s characters idealize a state of attunement. “What never ceased to amaze me and cast a halo around our evening was that ever since we’d met, we’d been thinking along the same lines,” Elio says, about Michel. In psychology, attunement, which is sometimes cited as a prerequisite for healthy love, denotes an ability to intuit what the other needs, and to interpret signs in the way that they were intended. The relationships in Aciman’s novel, be they transient or lasting, are marked by an affinity that tends to deepen through conversation, though it requires no words. It is all the more ironic, then, that this reviewer’s experience of “Find Me” was one of such profound disattunement . The book wants to be intimate, profound, but it reads as glib and remote, impervious to actual feeling. Indeed, the text seems not to account for an audience. An apter title would be “Get Lost.”

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