Written by Kiara Co
Find Me by André Aciman is the sequel to Call Me By Your Name, which published in 2007 and gained more recognition recently because of the 2017 film adaptation that starred Timothée Chalamet as the young Elio and Armie Hammer as Oliver. The film gained significant praise from many people and critics, while also receiving numerous award nominations.
To refresh your minds, the first book is about the story of a sudden and powerful romance that blossoms between an adolescent boy and a summer guest at his parents’ cliff-side mansion on the Italian Riviera. Unprepared for the consequences of their attraction, at first both of them feigns indifference. But during the restless summer weeks that follow, unrelenting buried currents of obsession and fear, and fascination and desire, intensify their passion as they test the charged ground between them. What grows from the depths of their spirits is a romance of scarcely six weeks’ duration and an experience that marks them for a lifetime. For what the two discover on the Riviera and during a sultry evening in Rome is the one thing both already fear they may never truly find again: total intimacy.
In the sequel Find Me, Aciman shows us Elio’s father, Samuel, on a trip from Florence to Rome to visit Elio, who has become a gifted classical pianist. A chance encounter on the train with a beautiful young woman upends Sami’s plans and changes his life forever.
Elio soon moves to Paris, where he, too, has a consequential affair, while Oliver, now a New England college professor with a family, suddenly finds himself contemplating a return trip across the Atlantic. Aciman is a master of sensibility, of the intimate details, and the emotional nuances that are the substance of passion. Find Me brings us back inside the magic circle of one of our greatest contemporary romances to ask if, in fact, true love ever dies.
This novel is from the perspective of Elio’s father, Samuel. It was kind of confusing because in Call Me By Your Name, Samuel already passed away near the end of the novel. So the time period of the novel was hard to keep track of. Having the story mainly on Samuel was kind of disappointing because throughout the story, it felt so bland. Find Me did not feel like a sequel to Call Me By Your Name at all and the book in general felt so plotless. Even the tone of the book wasn’t the same as the previous book, which felt so beautiful and as if you were in the setting of the book. Regardless, Aciman’s writing is still fantastic.
Since the story revolves mostly around Samuel, it didn’t have much Elio and Oliver content in this sequel. Elio was mentioned a bit from the last half of the book while Oliver was barely mentioned until almost at the end of the book. This was quite disappointing because it makes no sense to have this timing before Samuel’s death and barely any characters mentioned from the first book. Both Elio and Oliver interaction only seemed to be mentioned rather than an actual scene.
There were four sections of the book and it was confusing to keep up with exactly what is happening, where, and why as it was kind of inconsistent. The first section is called Tempo, followed by Cadenza, Capriccio, and Da Capo. The book just focused on Samuel’s romances and even when he is going to meet up with Elio, there was barely anything about Elio. The side characters of this book felt so weak because it was so much focused on Samuel.
There are talks of a movie sequel, but as of now, we have no clue how the movie sequel will take place. Will it follow the story of Find Me? Or will it pick up from the movie version ending of Call Me By Your Name since the ending of the movie was different from the book. The book version was able to fast forward into everybody’s lives, whereas the movie ends off Elio feeling heartbroken after hearing Oliver is going to get married.
If you read Call Me By Your Name and need another book that doesn’t take too long to read, then definitely pick up Find Me!
Find Me is available from Amazon, Book Depository, and other good book retailers.
Have you read Find Me? Tell us in the comments below!
Synopsis | Goodreads
In this spellbinding exploration of the varieties of love, the author of the worldwide bestseller Call Me by Your Name revisits its complex and beguiling characters decades after their first meeting.
No novel in recent memory has spoken more movingly to contemporary readers about the nature of love than André Aciman’s haunting Call Me by Your Name. First published in 2007, it was hailed as “a love letter, an invocation . . . an exceptionally beautiful book” (Stacey D’Erasmo, The New York Times Book Review). Nearly three quarters of a million copies have been sold, and the book became a much-loved, Academy Award–winning film starring Timothée Chalamet as the young Elio and Armie Hammer as Oliver, the graduate student with whom he falls in love.
In Find Me, Aciman shows us Elio’s father, Samuel, on a trip from Florence to Rome to visit Elio, who has become a gifted classical pianist. A chance encounter on the train with a beautiful young woman upends Sami’s plans and changes his life forever.
Elio soon moves to Paris, where he, too, has a consequential affair, while Oliver, now a New England college professor with a family, suddenly finds himself contemplating a return trip across the Atlantic.
Aciman is a master of sensibility, of the intimate details and the emotional nuances that are the substance of passion. Find Me brings us back inside the magic circle of one of our greatest contemporary romances to ask if, in fact, true love ever dies.
