André Aciman "Find Me"

UK, Faber & Faber, 2019

Well, this was sort of disappointing. And don’t get me wrong, it’s not a bad book, but it clearly isn’t what the synopsis claims it to be.

Find Me is not a Call Me by Your Name (CMBYN) sequel about Elio and Oliver. They are mentioned here and there (not nearly enough) and turn up eventually but the focus is not on them. It’s mostly about Elio’s father.

The story starts with Elio’s father Samuel who is travelling to Rome by train. On board he meets a young woman, roughly half his age, who he, for some reason, finds fascinating. They chat the whole way to Rome and don’t want to leave each other even when they reach their destination. So, they don’t. They get to know each other, roaming the streets of Rome, and finally form some sort of a romantic relationship. Honestly, that’s pretty much all that happens for the first 107 pages, before Elio is finally introduced to the plot. 

Aciman is obviously still a great writer, I did love many passages that spoke to me on a personal level or were just written beautifully. Still, I sometimes couldn’t decide if the author’s wording was pure genius or cheesy and tacky as hell. Most of those beautiful and poetic passages would’ve worked better in characters’ thoughts / descriptive text, not in dialogue.

What this book feels like is pure fan service. Fans wanted a sequel and he wrote one. Except it seems he never really wanted to write a sequel, so it turned out to be a book about Elio’s father’s romantic and sexual conquests to be exact. I feel like die-hard Call Me by Your Name fans would be very disappointed with Find Me. Especially considering how this ‘sequel’ to a beautiful and heartbreaking queer love story mostly tells a story of a straight couple with an age gap. If that isn’t queerbaiting and false marketing, I don’t know what is.

Ah yes, age-gap couples. Everybody who has read CMBYM knows there’s quite a big age difference between Elio and Oliver. So now Aciman introduces another age-gap couple, Samuel and Miranda, the girl he met on the train. But wait, that’s not it. There are even more age-gap couples in Find Me. Trust me when I say I’m the last person to judge anyone for writing about age-gap couples but if there are so many in one relatively short book, it starts to seem more like a fetish and less like … whatever it was supposed to be. Or is it just me?

That being said, the second half of the book where Elio and Oliver show up already feels more like the good old CMBYN. I kind of liked the way their story ended (even though I would have preferred it to end right before the very last chapter called Da Capo) but I also feel like maybe I shouldn’t have read it. I don’t know, it’s hard to explain. It was satisfactory in a way but, then again, CMBYN is a book that works perfectly well as a whole.

I’m not sure if I can really recommend it to any CMBYN fans ... Alright, if you want to know what happens to Elio and Oliver eventually, and don’t mind reading about Elio’s father’s love life for half the book, go ahead and give it a go. Find Me is not boring or bad or horrible, it just isn’t what it claims to be. I might feel a lot different about the book if someone had let me know beforehand what to expect of it. I thought my rating was going to be very low but once I realised the book wasn’t going to be what I wanted it to be, I actually quite enjoyed it, despite the lack of Elio and Oliver in the first half. So, if you are willing to keep an open mind about it, you may not be as disappointed as I was at first. It is very beautifully written, and one thing is for sure, Find Me makes you ponder love and life in ways you probably haven’t before.

“It’s just that the magic of someone new never lasts long enough. We only want those we can’t have. It’s those we lost or who never knew we existed who leave their mark. The others barely echo.” 

“Aren’t those the absolute worst scenarios: the things that might have happened but never did and might still happen though we’ve given up hoping they could.” 

“You’re wrong about my courage,” he said. “I’ve never even had the courage to call him, to write to him, much less to visit him. All I can do when I’m alone is whisper his name in the dark. But then I laugh at myself. I just pray I’ll never whisper it when I’m with someone else.” 

Music doesn’t give answers to questions I don’t know how to ask. I doesn’t tell me what I want. It reminds me that I may still be in love, though I’m no longer sure I know what that means, being in love. I think about people all the time, yet I’ve hurt many more than I’ve cared for. I can’t even tell what I feel, though feel something I still do, even if it’s more like a sense of absence and loss, maybe even failure, numbness, or total unknowing. I was sure of myself once, I thought I knew things, knew myself, and people loved that I reached out to touch them when I blustered into their lives and didn’t even ask or doubt that I mightn’t be welcome. Music reminds me of what my life should have been. But it doesn’t change me.