One of my goals during this quarantine is to read more. I’ve loved to read from a young age, but during the school year I find that I often don’t have time to dive into a good book.
One of the first books I picked up during this time was Find Me by Andre Aciman. Published in late 2019, it is the sequel to Call Me By Your Name. I read Call Me By Your Name is at the end of high school, a time when I was struggling with the prospect of my future, and the book’s beautiful prose and characters turned it into a magical read. Needless to say, I was excited, yet cautious, about the prospect of Aciman’s sequel.
I went into the book not knowing much about what the plot was going to be about. It took me much longer to get through the 260 pages; if I had to pick two words to describe by reading experience it is disappointed and confused.
I’m hesitant to review books that I don’t like because I myself like to write and know how much goes into one work. I think that Aciman is a talented writer and not liking this book doesn’t undo any of that.
Before I delve into what agitated me about the read, I am going to talk about the parts that I did like:
#1 Aciman’s Beautiful Writing There is no mistaking that Aciman is a master of the craft. Some of my favorite quotes were:
- “’Love is easy,’ I said. “It’s the courage to love and to trust that matters…’”
- “’We haven’t spoken in ages, and I don’t know that we’re friends, though I’m sure we will always be.’”
- “’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.’”
- “’All of it reminds me that our lives are nothing more than excavation digs that are always tiers deeper than we thought.’”
- “How many sunken layers deep are those we thought we knew simply because we loved them?”
- “What is so dreadful about farewells and departures is the near certainty that we’ll never see each other again.”
#2 The Theme of Time I thought Aciman did a wonderful job of weaving the concept of time throughout each of the four stories in the book. Some of my favorite quotes were:
- “I’ve taught you how to earmark moments where time stops, but these moments mean very little unless they’re echoed in someone you love.”
- “’It belongs to the past,’ I said, trying to make amends. ‘Nothing belongs to the past.’”
- “Time never casts shadows and memory doesn’t drop ashes”
- “The past, or something like the past, like memory, or maybe not just memory, but tiers and layers deeper, like life’s invisible watermark that I still wasn’t seeing.”
And now onto why I was confused and disappointed:
#1 The Insta-Love Insta Love is one of my pet peeve’s in literature. I couldn’t stand the first 100 pages of this book because of the insta love. Elio’s dad Samuel meets a woman, Miranda, on a train and that very same day they are in love and apparently his life is changed forever by her? His character was my least favorite of the book because I felt like it was so different from the understanding, open dad I read in Call Me By Your Name. By the end of their first day together Samuel is telling Miranda “Everything in my life was merely prologue until now, merely delay, merely pastime, merely waste of time until I came to know you.” This didn’t make sense to me: what about watching Elio grow up, or falling in love with his ex wife?
The insta love with Elio and Michel as well as with Oliver, Paul, and Erica further proves this point. Aciman needs to build more of a reason for why characters end up together.
#2 The ending I don’t think that the happy ending was necessary, and it undid the moving ending of Call Me By Your Name. Overall, it was very underwhelming.
#3 The objectification of women This book made me realize an aspect of Aciman’s writing style that he is also guilty of in Call Me By Your Name, but that I didn’t see until Find Me. The women he writes about are all flat characters, with little personality, and all of them fall under the “male gaze”. Throughout all of Find Me there are only two female characters and both are only seen through Samuel and Oliver’s objectifying glances.
Every woman in Aciman’s work is tossed to the side with little thought given to them in order to build up the male characters. In the beginning of Find Me we learn that Samuel has divorced Elio’s mother for reasons that don’t make sense and that were never alluded to in Call Me By Your Name. We also get a whole part of the book dedicated to Samuel, but we never get to learn more about Mrs. Pearlman’s perspective (her first name isn’t even mentioned). By the end of the book Samuel has died (leaving behind an enormously emphasized legacy that Elio holds dear) while Mrs. Pearlman is mentioned as living in the same house as Elio with a nurse to care for her Alzheimer’s, but we never even get to see her.
The casting off of woman is also true of Miranda. By the end of the book she has borne Samuel a son, but Aciman seems to make this her only purpose. Her son talks with Elio and Oliver and they decide “the child was our child. The two of us knew it. And my father, who no longer was alive, knew it just as well, had known all along.” I’m sorry, but this is almost laughable. The child is Miranda’s, she is the one raising him, yet she isn’t even talked about in these final scenes.
Final Thoughts Skip out on Find Me if you want to keep the beauty of Call Me By Your Name intact. I am looking forward to the movie sequel because the director, Luca Guadagnino, has said that they won’t be using the plot of the second novel.