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:	286,533
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, Out of Egypt, Eight White Nights, False Papers, Alibis, and Harvard Square, and most recently Enigma Variations, now out in paperback. He's the editor of The Proust Project and 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

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 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, New York Magazine, Nylon, NY Post, Observer, Oprah.com, Publishers Weekly, Thrillist, TIME, The Times (UK), Town & Country, Washington Post, Woman’s Day, Yahoo, Vogue, Vox, Vulture, USA Today

"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)

“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

“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

"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

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