Find Me

I'm so disappointed. This was just... not good and not needed. If you were hoping for more Elio and Oliver, you'll be sorely disappointed to find out that their paths don't even cross again until about 90% of the way into this book.

The first half is focused on Elio's father, Samuel, ten years after Oliver's summer in Italy. Now divorced from Elio's mother, Samuel meets a woman half his age on a train, and they fall in love instantly. I ended up skimming through a lot of this as I just couldn't make myself care. I didn't come here for Samuel's story, I came for more Elio and Oliver.

The next section is devoted to Elio and his meeting with a man twice his age (not sure what was up with the huge age gaps in this book) and their subsequent love affair. There are moments where Elio's pain over his lost love shines through and those are what kept me reading because to be honest, I didn't care about this new relationship either.

Next comes a brief section devoted to Oliver. It's approximately twenty years later and at a party in his honor, a friend plays a piece on the piano that immediately transports him back to that Italian summer so many years ago when Elio played that same piece for him. It is clear that Oliver hasn't been the same since that summer and he wonders if he should make a trip back to Italy.

This final section is where I was hoping the story would make up for all the crap that took up the first 85% of the book but sadly it didn't. The reunion between Elio and Oliver is incredibly rushed, on one page Oliver is thinking about going to Italy, and the next they're literally weeks into their visit. The intensity that was originally there between Elio and Oliver in Call Me By Your Name is severely lacking. What should be a satisfying end to their story, isn't. I wish I hadn't even bothered with this.

André Aciman's Find Me is a profoundly moving novel that picks up years after the events of his earlier book, Call Me by Your Name. In Find Me, we follow Elio, now a successful classical pianist, as he embarks on a journey of self-discovery and love. Along the way, he meets a number of fascinating characters, including Michel, a charismatic lawyer who Elio falls in love with, and Miranda, a young woman who stirs feelings in Elio that he thought he had buried long ago.

As the story unfolds, the characters struggle with their desires, pasts, and futures, all against the backdrop of stunning locations like Rome, Paris, and New York City. Aciman's writing is as beautiful as it is honest, capturing the raw emotions of his characters with incredible depth and insight.

I thoroughly enjoyed Find Me and would definitely recommend it to anyone who loved the first book. I would be excited to see a third book in the series, which apparently is already in the works (38:05 min), as I feel there is still so much more to explore in this rich and captivating world.

What a strange little book. The whole time I was reading it, I couldn't help but feel that it was semi-rushed out to capitalize on the success of the Call Me By Your Name movie. I bet he had these vignettes floating around in his head for a while, and being able to write short stories that only thematically connected probably helped him get the thing done more quickly than if he had to write a full novel.

I liked it, but didn't love it. That Aciman technique of minutely dissecting every tiny shade of physical touch, facial expression, glance, word, tone, feels fresh and honest and beautiful when the book opens, but it started to grate on me and become annoying by the middle. For much of the book, the writing is sublime, but there are moments where he gets too abstract, or oppositely, too detailed, which pulls you out. He's at his best when the writing lands as he no doubt wants it to - universal, relatable, expressing meaning that you didn't even realize was contained in human interactions.

I wasn't quite sure what to do with the titles of each section of the book - although I will admit that the middle section, Cadenza, felt structured like a musical cadenza. Hitting various themes of Elio's life, climaxing to the final trill - then leaving off in the middle, not really an ending, letting you wonder what happened to Elio and Michel.

I rejected the ending - the idea that Elio and Oliver somehow end up happy together long in the future is both heartbreaking and wildly unrealistic. When I saw Aciman speak, he said he found it difficult to peer inside Oliver's head, it's a character he doesn't identify with - and this came across in the book. The Oliver section is the most opaque, it's difficult to really wrap yourself around that character.

I'm glad I read this, but I don't think it's a must-read by any means, like Call Me By Your Name.