Find Me

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:	9780374155018
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	10/29/2019
Pages:	272
Sales rank:	969
Product dimensions:	8.20(w) x 5.50(h) x 1.10(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.

Editorial Reviews

08/26/2019

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. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

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

★ 10/01/2019

Love in all its sublime iterations is at the heart of Aciman's incandescent sequel to the acclaimed Call Me by Your Name. It's been ten years since the heartbreaking end to the passionate summertime affair between 17-year-old piano prodigy Elio and his father's protégé, Oliver, an American graduate student living with them in Italy. Now Elio resides in Rome, visited frequently by his father, Samuel. The two languidly walk the streets, revisiting places that have been meaningful to each and eventually sharing these vigils with new lovers. In sensuous prose, Aciman creates honest relationships unfettered by age, gender, or time, perfectly capturing that initial hesitancy one experiences when embarking upon an intimate liaison. The joy and mystery of music, so wondrously described that you can hear it, features prominently in the story when Elio bonds with Michel, whom he meets at a chamber concert in Paris. Though Elio and Michel care deeply for each other, readers will wonder if Elio can ever forget his first love and whether Oliver, a married professor with two children, will ever find his way back to Elio. VERDICT Aciman gifts readers with a beautiful 21st-century romance that reflects on the remembrance of things past and the courage to embrace the future. Highly recommended. [See Prepub Alert, 5/5/19.]—Sally Bissell, formerly with Lee Cty. Lib. Syst., Fort Myers, FL

Library Journal

2019-07-28
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.

Kirkus Reviews

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