Find Me
Andre Aciman, 2019
Farrar, Straus & Giroux
272 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780374155018
Summary
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 Andre 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 Timothee 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. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—January 2, 1951
• Where—Alexandria, Egypt; Rome, Italy
• Education—B.A., Lehman College; M.A., Ph.D., Harvard University
• Awards—Whiting Award, Lambda Literary Award
• Currently—lives in New York, New York, USA
Andre Aciman (as-i man) is an Egyptian-Italian-American writer. He is the author of several novels, including Call Me by Your Name (2007) and its sequel Find Me (2020). In 1995, he published his memoir Out of Egypt, which won the Whiting Award, and which The New York Times compared to the styles of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Lawrence Durrell, and Anton Chekkov.
Background and career
Aciman was born in Alexandria, Egypt, and raised in a multi-lingual family that spoke primarly French but also Italian, Greek, Ladino, and Arabic. His parents were Sephardic Jews, of Turkish and Italian origin, whose families had settled in Alexandria in 1905. Because increased tensions with Israel put Jews in a precarious position, his family left Egypt in 1965.
After his father purchased Italian citizenship for the family, Aciman moved with his mother and brother to Rome while his father moved to Paris. In 1968 the family moved to New York City. From there, Aciman attended Lehman College. He went on to earn an M.A. and Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Harvard University.
Currently, Aciman is distinguished professor at the Graduate Center of City University of New York, where he teaches the history of literary theory and the works of Marcel Proust. He previously taught creative writing at New York University and French literature at Princeton and Bard College. He lives with his wife and three sons in New York. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retreived 4/9/2020.)
Book Reviews
[Find Me] is a lyrical meditation on being forced to move to another location after the party’s over, on the Sisyphean task of trying to replicate the magic of young passion…. [I]t strikes an affectingly melancholy chord.
Josh Duboff - New York Times Book Review
Aciman’s quiet, label-free presentation of bisexual life represents a minor triumph…. Likewise, his refusal to offer easy resolution, which infuses the whole romantic enterprise with a kind of delicious melancholy. There are moments, particularly in the final chapter, that may have readers gazing tearfully into their fireplaces, real or imaginary, just like Timothee Chalamet at the end of Luca Guadagnino’s superlative film of Call Me by Your Name.
Charles Arrowsmith - Washington Post
Aciman writes about desire with blunt honesty, describing erotic and emotional interactions with equal clarity. Sex can be tender or not, the connection lasting or ephemeral, but it is almost always multilayered and complex.
Clea Simon - Boston Globe
With all of the richly painted details, emotional nuance, and deeply affecting romance as the first installment, this book will draw you in and make you believe in love again.
Good Housekeeping
The elegant sequel to Aciman’s celebrated first novel, Call Me by Your Name, revisits his best-known characters some 20 years later.… The novel again demonstrates Aciman’s capacity to fuse the sensual and the cerebral in stories that touch the heart.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review) Aciman's incandescent sequel to the acclaimed Call Me by Your Name.… [Find Me is] a beautiful 21st-century romance that reflects on the remembrance of things past and the courage to embrace the future. Highly recommended. —Sally Bissell, formerly with Lee Cty. Lib. Syst., Fort Myers, FL
Library Journal
(Starred review) 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… [Will the] star-crossed lovers reunite…. One can only hope.
Booklist
Aciman blends assuredly mature themes with deep learning… 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.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. The book begins with a conversation between Miranda and Samuel, who are strangers. What is your first impression of them? What are the similarities and differences in attitudes, beliefs, and experiences that draw them to each other? What are the critical moments in the development of their relationship? Why might Aciman have chosen this opening, given that the story ultimately belongs to Elio and Oliver?
2. Who is the "Me" of the book’s title? Might there be more than one? What does it mean to be found? How are the themes of love, loss, and loneliness explored in each section?
3. Miranda’s father is editing a dissertation that contains parables, which he says prove that "life and time are not in sync" and that we all "have many lives." How is each character’s story a parable about how time and life are not in sync? How does each have many lives?
4. What is a vigil? What are the vigils that Samuel and Elio are looking forward to in Rome? How does Miranda’s presence affect their experience? Are there other significant vigils in the book?
5. How are Elio and Michel, in the early stages of their love affair, like Samuel and Miranda? What vigils do they establish? What are the differences between the two couples?
6. When Michel asks his father, Adrien, who Leon was, his father replies, "You’re making me remember, and I don’t want to remember." What is the significance of the story of Adrien and Leon and the musical score, the cadenza, that Adrien leaves to his son? Is there a message hidden in Leon’s work? Why is Elio determined to help Michel discover who Leon was and how he died? In the end, does Michel find out what his father didn’t want to remember?
7. What is a canard? Why is it the word Michel chooses to describe Oliver’s marriage? Is it meant to be ironic? Are there other canards in the characters’ lives?
8. The story of Elio and Oliver is revealed gradually. What do we learn about them in each section? How did Elio’s experience of first love as a boy shape the man he has become? What do we know of Oliver’s life in the years after he left Elio in Italy? What does Oliver’s infatuation with Erica and Paul tell us about him? What happens in the time between the events of "Capriccio" and "DaCapo"?
9. How are the different stages of life—youth, middle age, and old age—depicted? How does a character’s age influence his or her beliefs about life, love, and death? Why does Miranda tell Samuel that "none of it would have happened if you were thirty years old?" How does Michel describe the differences between his younger and older selves?
10. Samuel and Miranda, and Elio and Michel, meet entirely by chance. In the relationships that develop between each couple, as well as Oliver’s fantasy relationship with Erica and Paul, what are the moments, words, or gestures that suggest the possibility of deeper connections?
11. Which of the characters believe in the power of fate to alter the course of a life? How does fate or chance impact each of them? How do the lyrics of the Brazilian song that Elio translates for Michel resonate throughout the book?
12. Does Elio fall in love with Michel? Has Oliver ever loved anyone except Elio? Why does love come so easily to Samuel and Miranda? In general, what lessons does the book teach us about love? To whom is it available? What sacrifices does it require?
13. Miranda’s father says, "I want those who outlive me to extend my life, not just to remember it." Michel tells Elio, "Nothing belongs to the past." How are past and present intertwined and what are the consequences? By the end of the book, how have the lives of the deceased been extended into the present? Why does Elio feel that his half brother is his and Oliver’s child, and that his father "knew it just as well, had known it all along?"
14. What is the significance of each section title? For example, "Tempo," the title of the first section, is a musical term meaning the speed at which a passage of music is or should be played. It is also the Italian word for time. How do both meanings resonate? What are the meanings of the other section titles? How are the themes of time and music interrelated?
15. Find Me is a romance, a tragicomic novel that spans generations, with themes of separation and reunion, exile, and jealousy. What are the moments of tragedy in the book? Of comedy? How else do the stories of Samuel and Miranda, Elio and Michel, and Elio and Oliver work as romance? What are other stories of lovers reunited after years of separation?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)
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