BOOKS: Find Me

We listened to André Aciman’s novel Find Me on a long road trip this weekend. We had both loved the film Call Me By Your Name, and I then read Aciman’s novel on which the film was based. This new novel is a sequel to the first (and there’s also buzz about a film sequel). I came to it having read some reviews, which were pointedly divergent, with some who loved it and some who found it very disappointing. In the end, I may agree with both. In this latest work, three separate sections visit Elio’s father Samuel, then Elio, then Oliver, at consequential points in their lives many years after the summer of the first novel, and, as with the first novel, there’s a coda where Elio and Oliver meet again. Time and timing is a running theme throughout, with ruminations on past roads not taken, and with romance across large age differences explored, with their inevitable “if I had met you when…”. Aciman keenly observes how certain events mark us, such that we may come back to them repeatedly, and may even observe “vigils” of certain places that we physically revisit because of their deep association with important memories. At one point, a peripheral character, a retired professor who still helps
students edit their theses, goes into a long tangent on his current project, a thesis about time. It’s an excuse to tell a series of short ironic vignettes about people who should have connected and might have connected but for the cruel tricks of time. The professor tells us that the student is really on to something, but they can’t quite figure out how to put it all together and conclude it. In retrospect, I think Aciman’s novel was even more like that thesis than he intended. There are beguiling characters here that mostly ring true, as well as lovely settings and references to classical arts and music that will delight the academically inclined. But those codas. I think with both novels, I would have loved them more perfectly if I’d have stopped short and not read the epilogs. But they just go so much against my own character, and against how I wanted his characters to be. I’m not one to dwell on roads not taken and things I can’t change, but Aciman and his characters thrive on it, it’s what animates them. I can’t deny the beautiful wistfulness of their Proustian meditations, nor can I deny that such characters can be true to life. I have known people whose early romantic experiences carved such deep grooves in them that they never recover. It’s strange that these two endings, so different from each other, both leave me with a nagging dissatisfaction. I’ve sometimes mused that perhaps an older and happier Shakespeare wrote A Winter’s Tale as a way to revisit Othello with an alternate ending. Each is satisfying and dissatisfying on different levels. Perhaps it’s the same with an older Aciman as he revisits his characters later in their lives.