Find Me

This essay contains spoilers for both “Call Me By Your Name” and “Find Me.”

Although “Call Me By Your Name” certainly delves into love, heartbreak and obsession, the new book, and Aciman, seem more interested, at least for the longest period of pages, in the idea of LOVE!!! at first sight.

In “Call Me By Your Name,” some of us who loved the film and the book were quick to brush off others’ issue with the fact that through the majority of the book Elio was 17 and Oliver was 24. I know I did.

In the sequel, Aciman looks at the issue head on. This time everyone is of legal age (and not only by Italian standards). Sometimes it (kind of) works - as with Elio and Michel, Elio’s lover, twice his age…mostly because Michel realizes that he is not and will never be Elio’s end game -and sometimes, it doesn’t - as with the first and longest chapter - with Samuel, Elio’s dad, falling for a young, vibrant , underwritten Miranda on a train.

At the end of that first chapter, Elio shows up (thank goodness!), and to my shock, completely buys in to his Dad’s new insta-relationship.

I wondered, was there something wrong with me? Was I so jaded by my past that I am missing something here? I don’t think so.

In “Call Me By Your Name” it never seemed creepy to me that Oliver was with Elio. Even when we meet them again, in “Find Me,” Oliver could very easily be the younger of the two…but with Samuel and Miranda, particularly in their sex scene, it all comes off a bit voyeuristic.

The older/younger/I’M IN LOVE theme continues when we see Elio experience something similar to his Dad, but in reverse, with Michel. Thanks to Aciman’s brilliance in writing Elio’s thoughts…this chapter mostly works. Even through groan inducing bits of dialogue when characters say things like “I love being like this with you.” Since when?! Since this morning? When Elio says something similar to Oliver in “Call Me By Your Name,” right before their first kiss, they have longed for each other for half a summer. Here, both Elio and Samuel fall instantly, which, to me, cheapens the first story.

Things (finally!) pick up with my favorite “find me” of the book - a mystery surrounding Michel’s Dad. A composition is left after the Dad’s death and may have been composed by a male lover of Michel’s. There are so many beautiful metaphors and parallels in this section, that I wouldn’t dare to explain.

“Fate, if it exists at all,” he said, “has strange ways of teasing us with patterns that may not be patterns at all but that hint at a vestigial meaning still being worked out. My father, your father, the piano, always the piano, and then you, like my son, but not like my son, and this Jewish tread running through both our lives, all of it reminds me that our lives are nothing more than excavation digs that are always tiers deeper than we thought. Or maybe it’s nothing, just nothing.”

The best and most surprising chapter is the one where Oliver takes the narration. Aciman doesn’t even tell us it’s him, but we know. Every thought, every quip is Oliver. Even though we never had the chance to peek inside his head in the first book, we have the great opportunity to sit there for a few -too few - pages in this one.

In this chapter we also (again… finally!) get our first swoon inducing moment of the book, but not until page 230, when Oliver has a conversation with Elio, only present in his mind…something he must have been doing for 20 years. It is a brilliant chapter reminiscent to the “San Clemente Syndrome” from CMBYN.

Then we have the very short last chapter that takes place (one assumes) after the last part of “Call Me By Your Name,” the book, not the movie, when Oliver returns to Italy. It is fantastic, and it is short.

I wondered as I was reading if I was being overtly critical of “Find Me'“ because I was disappointed that Elio and Oliver, although woven through in theme and casual conversation in the first chapter, are no where to be seen for so long,.

When Samuel says to Elio at the end of “Call Me By Your Name” - “I may have come close, but I never had what you had. Something always held me back or stood in the way” many of us wondered - is he talking about a man? A woman? What was it?

We learn about it here…and that brief story is much more interesting than the one we get with him and Miranda. Is what makes the last two chapters so good the longing to know more?! Maybe.

Although I have told you much, I won’t tell you where things end with Oliver and Elio. And “Find Me” does feel like an ending. Similar to the first book, we have to fill in many of the blanks on their future together.

It was great to have them back. Will I read this one again? Who knows?! Maybe when I’m Samuel’s age, it might resonate with me more. But not today.