Find Me: A Novel

by André Aciman

Overview

A New York Times Bestseller

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781250758071
Publisher:	Picador
Publication date:	08/04/2020
Pages:	272
Sales rank:	46,135
Product dimensions:	5.30(w) x 8.10(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

André Aciman is the New York Times bestselling author of Call Me by Your Name, Enigma Variations, Out of Egypt, Eight White Nights, False Papers, Alibis, Harvard Square, and is the editor of The Proust Project. He teaches comparative literature at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He lives with his wife in Manhattan.

Reading Group Guide

QUESTIONS AND TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION

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 Léon 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 Léon and the musical score, the cadenza, that Adrien leaves to his son? Is there a message hidden in Léon’s work? Why is Elio determined to help Michel discover who Léon 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 “Da Capo”?

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? What are real or imagined impediments?

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?

Editorial Reviews

Named an Goodreads, TIME and Vogue Best Book of 2019

Named one of the most anticipated Fall books by ABC News Online, Associated Press, Bustle, Buzzfeed, Canadian Broadcast Corporation, Chicago Tribune, Entertainment Weekly, Goodreads, Huffington Post, Hypable, Lit Hub, Marie Claire, Medium, The Millions, NewNowNext, New York Magazine, Nylon, NY Post, Observer, Oprah.com, Parade, Philadelphia Inquirer, Publishers Weekly, Thrillist, TIME, The Times (UK), Town & Country, Washington Blade, Washington Post, Woman’s Day, Yahoo, Vogue, Vox, Vulture, USA Today

"Dazzling" —Parul Sehgal of The New York Times Book Review at the 92nd St Y

"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 Timothée Chalamet at the end of Luca Guadagnino’s superlative film of 'Call Me by Your Name.'" —Charles Arrowsmith, The Washington Post

“[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 . . . it strikes an affectingly melancholy chord.” —Josh Duboff, The New York Times Book Review

"You don’t have to have read Call Me by Your Name, Aciman’s 2007 bestselling novel turned Oscar-nominated movie, to immediately fall in love with this sexy, melancholic follow-up. It stands entirely separate, yet connected, a beautiful ode to the passage of time, to the lasting power of true love and the ache of loneliness . . . the revelations about who these characters have become unraveling slowly like a gorgeous piece of classical music." —Buzzfeed

“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.” —Booklist (Starred Review)

"Love in all its sublime iterations is at the heart of Aciman’s incandescent sequel to the acclaimed Call Me by Your Name . . . Aciman gifts readers with a beautiful 21st-century romance that reflects on the remembrance of things past and the courage to embrace the future. —Library Journal (Starred Review)

“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

“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

“The sequel is just as maddeningly seductive as the original.”—ELLE

“Elegant . . . 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.” —Publishers Weekly

“[Find Me] is touching without being sentimental . . . An elegant, memorable story of enduring love across the generations.” —Kirkus Reviews

“Soulful”—People Magazine

“The focus of Find Me is the unlived life, the real life that comes to a standstill . . . Aciman's clever arrangement takes advantage of the frustrated desire of the reader to see Elio and Oliver reunited . . . Far more ambitious than Call Me by Your Name . . . great care has gone into the artistic shaping of this narrative.”—Anne Serre, The Times Literary Supplement

"A structural marvel . . . proves itself indispensable to longtime readers and newcomers alike."—Garrett Biggs, The Chicago Review of Books

"Find Me is a sensual delight . . . Throughout his nonfiction and fiction, Aciman has maintained a profound preoccupation with memory and the responsibility of history. An aching sense of vulnerability and fearlessness drives this book past any question of whether or not a sequel was warranted." —Lauren LeBlanc, Observer

“Find Me is written in the same spiraling prose . . . full of grace, with some sentences approaching page length—that Call Me by Your Name was. I devoured the novel quickly, and on rereading have found myself unable to break away from Aciman’s hypnotic rhythms.”—Spencer Kornhaber, The Atlantic

“I’m relishing this indulgent sequel—sex, sculptures, food, villas: everything a person could want from a novel or from life.” —Richie Hoffman, Poetry Foundation

“Exquisite”—Kate Erbland, IndieWire

"Aciman had his work cut out for himself in crafting a sequel as contemplative and gorgeous as Call Me by Your Name, which ended in its own coda of Elio's and Oliver's paths crossing years and years hence. Threading that needle perfectly, Aciman continues his story, parsing its very structure in his erudite, knowing style . . . Aciman's genius holds true and makes Find Me a splendid work in its own right." —Dave Wheeler, Shelf Awareness (Starred Review)

“Stubbornly unsentimental, but nevertheless beautiful . . . Find Me is, at heart, a meditation on how love bends and warps over time, but never quite disappears.”—Kristin Iversen, Nylon

"This [book] functioned like a medical-grade SAD lamp in the dead of February. It is a lively novel about sentimental Americans in Italy who feel a wider range of emotions in seven minutes than most people do in a month." —Molly Young, Vulture

“A devastatingly honest reflection on the authenticity of love and life . . . Find Me is a truly remarkable achievement of love beyond the honeymoon teenage years.”— Tomás Guerrero Jaramillo, Harvard Crimson

From the Publisher

Narrator Michael Stuhlbarg’s rough, raspy voice lends a whispery intimacy to this sequel to CALL ME BY YOUR NAME. That book focused on 17-year-old Elio's relationship with Oliver, a graduate student. This sequel focuses first on Sami, Elio’s father. It’s 10 years later. Sami is on a train to Rome to visit Elio, now a world-famous concert pianist, when he finds himself drawn to a woman half his age. Sami soon understands that this encounter will change his life forever. In Part II, it’s Elio’s life unfolding, including his liaison with Michel, an older man. When Oliver ends his marriage to find Elio again, Stuhlbarg underplays their meeting. The distance in his delivery keeps the tension just below the surface. Stuhlbarg’s elegant performance and Aciman’s sensitive writing keep things touching without ever being sentimental. Wonderful listening. S.J.H. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine

OCTOBER 2019 - AudioFile

Narrator Michael Stuhlbarg’s rough, raspy voice lends a whispery intimacy to this sequel to CALL ME BY YOUR NAME. That book focused on 17-year-old Elio's relationship with Oliver, a graduate student. This sequel focuses first on Sami, Elio’s father. It’s 10 years later. Sami is on a train to Rome to visit Elio, now a world-famous concert pianist, when he finds himself drawn to a woman half his age. Sami soon understands that this encounter will change his life forever. In Part II, it’s Elio’s life unfolding, including his liaison with Michel, an older man. When Oliver ends his marriage to find Elio again, Stuhlbarg underplays their meeting. The distance in his delivery keeps the tension just below the surface. Stuhlbarg’s elegant performance and Aciman’s sensitive writing keep things touching without ever being sentimental. Wonderful listening. S.J.H. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine

OCTOBER 2019 - AudioFile