FICTION
FIND ME
By Andre Aciman
Farrar, Straus and Giroux/Paperback/261 pages/ $18.95/ Books Kinokuniya/4 stars
When a novel like Call Me By Your Name illuminates love and what it means to be loved with such tender beauty, it takes your breath away. So one cannot help but approach a sequel with trepidation.
Fortunately, in Find Me, author Andre Aciman remains as sensitive and fearless in his depictions of love in all its incarnations as when Call Me By Your Name was first published 12 years ago - the novel re-appeared in the popular consciousness in 2017 when Italian film director Luca Guadagnino turned it into a critically acclaimed film by the same name.
Call Me By Your Name tells the story of Elio, a shy and intellectually precocious 17-year old pianist who is spending a hot, lazy summer with his parents at his family's villa in northern Italy. He falls for Oliver, a young, enigmatic American academic, who comes to help Elio's university professor father for six weeks. In the final chapter of the novel, the story leapfrogs five, 10 and 20 years after that fateful summer and, in Find Me, Aciman very smartly returns to fill the gaps the story left behind.
The novel is divided into four parts. First we meet Sami, Elio's father, who was a strong but minor presence in the first novel. In the opening pages, he falls in love with a beautiful young woman while on a train to Rome to visit his son. Within minutes, they are practically reading each other's minds and finishing each other's sentences.
The encounter feels contrived and the speed with which they fall in love is, ironically, tedious. Sami's portion takes up almost half of Find Me and, at times, it feels like his story could have been turned into another book altogether. However, it sets the stage for the rest of the novel and gives a glimpse of Elio's life in Rome, in the shadow of his lost love.
It is a relief to be in Elio's narrative presence again in the second chapter and to find him much the same but more self-assured. Now he is a piano teacher living in Paris, on the cusp of a life-altering love affair.
Aciman articulates love with unparalleled humanity and in Find Me, he continues to shine in the liminal space of unsaid emotions, the tension of vulnerability and the delicacy of affection which can exist between partners, parent and child, and kismet strangers.
In the sequel, Aciman turns a philosophical lens on the mysteries of love. How and why do we fall for the people we do, he seems to ask. His characters meet, detach, and reconnect again, and wonder, time and again, is it fate that brings them together or happenstance?
Michel, Elio's lover, says, "I suspect we have first selves and second selves and perhaps third, fourth, and fifth selves and many more in between... I could so easily never have found you, or never run into you again. Fate, if it exists at all, 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."
The characters stress the roles that not only chance but also courage play in finding love. Their concerns echo a line from Call Me By Your Name when Elio asks, "If not later, when?"
Aciman describes with the keenest feeling how we seek to know each other to know ourselves. Sami, Elio and Oliver, in the end, want to feel seen and understood, to be found in love.
Is Find Me as good as Call Me By Your Name? Can one compare the magical feeling of first love with any love that follows? It is a pleasure to revisit these characters when they are older, when they have hardened and softened in different places. It is a pleasure, too, to see how their lives and loves have evolved. The relationship between us, the readers and the characters has deepened, and that has its own power.
Maybe, hopefully, they will visit us again in 10 years' time.
If you like this, read: Enigma Variations by Andre Aciman (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2017, $40.64, available for order from Books Kinokuniya). Five stories tell the journey of Paul's life through his great loves in a novel which Aciman has called his best.
