Find Me

June 1, 2019

Published in 2007, Aciman's Call Me by Your Name has since sold nearly three quarters of a million copies and inspired an 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. Here, Elio's father has a life-changing encounter as he travels to Rome to visit Elio, now a classical pianist, and New England college professor Oliver suddenly misses life across the Atlantic.

Copyright 2019 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

August 15, 2019
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. An elegant, memorable story of enduring love across the generations.

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August 26, 2019
The elegant sequel to Aciman’s celebrated first novel, Call Me by Your Name, revisits his best-known characters some 20 years later. The story opens as Samuel, a classics professor who has abandoned hope of love, boards the train from Florence to Rome to visit his pianist son, Elio, the earlier novel’s narrator. On the train, Samuel strikes up a conversation with a beautiful photographer named Miranda, an American expatriate like him, though she’s half his age. In dialogue that quickly turns searching, they sense in each other a soul mate (“I’ve known you for less than an hour on a train. Yet you totally understand me”); later that day, once they arrive in Rome, they begin planning new lives together. Several years later, Elio has moved to Paris. He begins a satisfying relationship with Michael, an attorney two decades or so his senior, but Elio’s memories of Oliver, whom he loved and lost as a teen, reawaken. A third segment focuses on Oliver, now a married father yet unable to leave the past and its passion behind, before Elio and Oliver meet again in the novel’s brief coda. Elio is the heart of the novel, as its core themes—including fatherhood, music, the nature of time and fate, the weight and promise of the past—are infused with eroticism, nostalgia and tenderness in fluid prose. The novel again demonstrates Aciman’s capacity to fuse the sensual and the cerebral in stories that touch the heart. Agent: Lynn Nesbit, Janklow & Nesbit Associates.

Starred review from September 1, 2019
Set some 20 years after Aciman's novel Call Me by Your Name (2007), the inspiration for the acclaimed motion picture of the same title, this sometimes-elegiac sequel finds Elio now a celebrated classical pianist and Oliver an academic. To find out more about them, readers will have to be patient, though, for nearly the first half of the novel is given to Samuel, Elio's father, who meets a young woman half his age on a train from Florence to Rome, and the two quickly fall in love. Their relationship is echoed in the second of the novel's four movements in Elio's meeting a man, Michel, twice his age and falling in love. When we meet Oliver, he is hosting a party at his New York apartment. At the party are two young people, Paul and Erica, with whom Oliver is infatuated. Their leaving the party is an invitation for his melancholy meditation on love and the past, and it turns out that Oliver has been miserable for 20 years over his breakup with Elio, even though he was the one who ended the relationship. Will he have the inclination and energy to act on this? Call Me By Your Name was widely praised for its treatment of the nature of love, a theme that Find Me continues with subtlety and grace. Its treatment of the characters' psychology is astute and insightful, but what will ultimately drive reader interest is the question of whether star-crossed lovers Elio and Oliver will reunite. One can only hope.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)