Due to a sudden, unexpected passing in the family a few years ago and another more recently and my subsequent (mental) health issues stemming from that, I was unable to download this book in time to review it before it was archived as I did not visit this site for several years after the bereavements. This meant I didn't read or venture onto netgalley for years as not only did it remind me of that person as they shared my passion for reading, but I also struggled to maintain interest in anything due to overwhelming depression. I was therefore unable to download this title in time and so I couldn't give a review as it wasn't successfully acquired before it was archived. The second issue that has happened with some of my other books is that I had them downloaded to one particular device and said device is now defunct, so I have no access to those books anymore, sadly.

This means I can't leave an accurate reflection of my feelings towards the book as I am unable to read it now and so I am leaving a message of explanation instead. I am now back to reading and reviewing full time as once considerable time had passed I have found that books have been helping me significantly in terms of my mindset and mental health - this was after having no interest in anything for quite a number of years after the passings. Anything requested and approved will be read and a review written and posted to Amazon (where I am a Hall of Famer & Top Reviewer), Goodreads (where I have several thousand friends and the same amount who follow my reviews) and Waterstones (or Barnes & Noble if the publisher is American based). Thank you for the opportunity and apologies for the inconvenience.

As a stand alone novel this would be pretty great, as a book that’s marketing relied pretty heavily on being the sequel to “Call Me By Your Name” it disappointed. The last quarter of the book lined up with CMBYN, the rest of it seemed more like a tangent than a realistic depiction of the characters in their time after the events of the first book. The characters seemed the same in name alone, otherwise this indeed could have been a different book.

Call Me By Your Name was a massive hit but I never got round to reading it. Therefore I was delighted to get this “sequel” from NetGalley. However, it appears that not only is it NOT strictly speaking a sequel – it is also a pretty poor piece of writing. I couldn’t stick with it, to be honest. The writing is leaden and turgid, the dialogue unconvincing, the emotions clichéd and the storyline unoriginal. Although the two young men from CMBYN do indeed reappear here, it’s only right towards the end of the book, by which point I’d given up, and the first tedious half is devoted to Elios’s father Samuel who on a train journey to visit him meets a young woman on the train and instantly falls for her. This most unlikely of relationships was boring to read about and hard to believe in. So my introduction to Aciman has been a disappointment indeed. Not recommended.

I couldn’t get into this book. It sadly wasn’t for me. I didn’t enjoy the set up different parts. Forcing relationships on others. It felt very off course of how it could have been

Find Me is a novel about love and turning points, written as a follow up of sorts to Aciman's earlier book Call Me By Your Name. The narrative opens with Samuel, an older man on a trip from Florence to Rome to visit his son Elio, meeting a stranger on a train who will change his life. The next section follows Elio falling into a new love affair, and then finally Oliver, a college professor with a wife and family, contemplates travelling across the Atlantic, and at the last moment, their stories come together.

The novel is a somewhat confusing one because it doesn't really feel like there's a point to any of the narratives or why they're being told. Samuel's story was lacking in any kind of tension, and Elio's had a musical mystery subplot that didn't feel integrated. By the end of those parts, it felt like the uniting theme (other than their familial relationship) was age gaps in love, but it wasn't clear why. Oliver's part was mostly set up for the brief ending, and people who were looking for a sequel to Elio and Oliver's story from the earlier novel would likely be disappointed. Without being invested in them (though having read CMBYN), the experience just didn't feel engaging and the narratives didn't feel either resolved or artfully unresolved.

Find Me contains the kind of settings, romance, and atmosphere found in other of Aciman's novels, but the narratives are a real let down and the characters feel quite hastily depicted, especially the new ones.

This is not a direct sequel to the writer's other book, but equally well written & emotional.
I find his prose amazing and really lose myself in his books. Characters and the romance was lyrical.

Thanks a lot to the publisher and NetGalley for this copy in exchange for an honest review.

This shouldn't be news to most people by now given that there are reviews of this everywhere but suffice it to say that Find Me is not the sequel to Call Me By Your Name most people were expecting (me included). Hear me out, but I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing.

I was worried before I picked this up that Aciman might have written some naff, fan-fiction-esque follow up to CMBYN where he tried to replicate the success and beauty of the first book and gave the fans exactly what they wanted... but that is definitely not what Find Me is.

Aciman has instead written a book which isn't really about Elio or Oliver at all - or at least not the two of them together. In fact the two of them aren't in a scene together until probably the last 10% of the novel. Instead we follow Elio's father, Samuel, as he embarks on a relationship with a much younger woman who he meets on a train; Elio and a relationship he begins with a guy he met at a concert, and Oliver, who is unhappily married. I've read a number of reviews which make comparison of Samuel's story (which makes for the longest section) to the plot of the 1995 movie Before Sunrise and the two are really quite similar. Elio's section went off on a weird tangent and then I felt the novel kind of petered out towards the end.

In all honesty I failed to see what Aciman was trying to say or do with this follow up. I read somewhere that he planned it before the success of the film, and while I admire him for not writing the sequel everyone wanted and expected I did finish this feeling "...so what? That's it?!". That said, Find Me is a perfectly readable novel in its own right - I devoured it in less than a day. Unfortunately it's likely to disappoint most readers as it's not sure quite what it's trying to say or be.

The first part is obnoxious to the point that it feels like deliberate mocking of the audience who will surely be drawn to this after the success of the Call Me By Your Name film. It gets a bit better after that, but not by much.

A beautifully written charming very real tale of peoples relationships.

Yes some people are disappointed thats it’s not “sequel “ to call me by your name but it’s probably more reflective of how relationships end and change over time.

Great story structure and characters that are truly unforgettable

Literary sequels are definitely a trend this year with the recent massive release of “The Testaments” and now the forthcoming publication of André Aciman’s much-anticipated sequel to his novel “Call Me by Your Name”. Readers naturally have a lot of scepticism about these beloved stories being extended. The very popular film adaptation of “Call Me by Your Name” brought the romantic story of sensitive teenager Elio and older graduate student Oliver to a much wider audience. This not only prompted fans to clamour to know what happened next between these lovers but it also encouraged Aciman to revisit their story as he said in an interview “The film made me realize that I wanted to be back with them and watch them over the years.” Many will instantly dismiss the creation of “Find Me” as a money-grabbing opportunity given the new-found popularity of the original book. Whatever the motivation for writing it, I can assure you this new novel doesn’t kowtow to fans. Rather, it thoughtfully explores the deeper meaning of desire when stretched over time and juxtaposes a few different kinds of romantic encounters which turn into profound life-changing events. That’s not to say this new novel is without its problems and it’s likely to delight and frustrate fans in equal measure.

I read “Call Me by Your Name” shortly after it was originally published in 2007 and swooned. Revisiting Elio and Oliver’s story by watching the film adaptation a couple of years ago reawakened my love for their story. But there’s an important difference between the book and film. The film ends with Elio receiving the news that Oliver is going to be married which prompts him to mournfully stare into a fireplace. However, the original novel ends with a flash forward far into the future when Elio and Oliver reunite in Italy and we learn the news that Elio’s father Samuel has died at a relatively young age. Whether their passion is reignited or not is left vague, but their reconnection is cemented. This poses an interesting dilemma for the sequel because it needs to either fill readers in on what happened up to this point or follow them after it. “Find Me” manages to do both in a way which is unique and clever.

The first section follows Samuel or “Sami”, now divorced, on a train journey to deliver a lecture and meet up with his son Elio who is now a pianist. Sami encounters a spirited much-younger woman on the train and through long intimate discussions they develop a surprisingly deep connection. The story then moves forward in time to follow Elio whose musical career has blossomed and in Paris he meets an older gentleman in an encounter which quickly turns romantic. The novel moves on again to a period when Oliver is throwing a leaving party as he’s moving with his wife to teach at another university. During this party he feels a mixture of desire towards a young woman and a young man. Only in the final (much shorter) section do we see what happens when Oliver and Elio reunite. No doubt many readers will be impatient with the long lead up to this reunion, but I admire the way Aciman patiently considers the role that time, distance, chance and the imagination play in the strange alchemy which results in desire and passion.

Nevertheless, I did have a couple of issues with the novel. There are many overt discussions between the characters about romance and the degrees of intimacy which we either allow or deny ourselves. They explore meaningful sentiments and these exchanges are not entirely unrealistic especially when spoken between new lovers who come from a certain rarefied and highly-cultured class. But they sometimes verge into such self-conscious and ponderous territory that they become ludicrously esoteric. For instance, at one point a character named Michel states: “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 of vestigial meaning still being worked out.” This carefully-formed statement might be something a high-minded person would ruminate upon in the middle of the night but when pronounced aloud in the company of a new lover it could only be met with a slight snigger at its philosophical loftiness. I feel like it would have been more natural if we followed the characters thoughts rather than verbalizing them to each other in an occasionally pretentious fashion.

I also felt slightly disappointed with the way Aciman doesn’t grant as much space in either the original novel or its sequel to female desire. They both almost exclusively focus on the men’s romantic and sexual urges and there are multiple instances where women, girlfriends and wives are slighted in favour of a new partner. Of course, this isn’t an unrealistic depiction of what happens to many women but instead of granting a comparable degree of fictional space to their experience the author focuses almost entirely on the men’s shifting emotional landscape as if these women’s feelings don’t matter. As a consequence, many of his female characters get sidelined. The only female voice that’s granted much of a role in either of these books is that of Miranda who Sami meets on a train. But we only hear her speak rather than get access to her thoughts or a clear idea of what motivates her.

Despite my reservations about these aspects of the novel, I was drawn into the story and its emotionally complex depiction of desire and sex. Not only does the novel explore the romantic tension between people who may or may not ultimately stay together, but it shows how so many of these urges are sublimated and experienced in other ways – particularly in music. One plotline follows the existence of a secret musical score and each section of the novel itself is named after an element of music. These suggest the undercurrents of feeling which accompany us through life, especially when recalling people we still love but didn’t stay with. It’s moving how Aciman depicts this yearning which endlessly draws his characters into memories of the past, prompts them to speak subliminally to each other and hope for a possible reunion in the future – no matter how unlikely.

What Aciman captures so well in these novels is how the unexpected pull of desire forces his characters into a turning point. These potential trysts whether realised or not aren’t just about sex but about choosing a radically different form of life from what his characters were previously living. They’re about communing with an individual’s deeper intentions for what they want in life and who that individual always hoped to become. Of course, these novels are also definitely about sex and in “Find Me” Aciman continues with his famous erotic imagery. No fruit is sexually ravished this time, but he does use suggestive metaphorical language concerning another fruit: “an overripe fig that parted all the way without tearing.”

Aciman’s speciality seems to be in capturing all the heated and emotional dynamics of that first erotic encounter – which more often happens in the mind rather than in physical expression. In their distance between each other which takes place over many years and across continents Elio and Oliver are able to extend this blood-rushing sensation. It appears Aciman believes this wouldn’t have been possible if they’d always been a couple because he states in this novel “the more we know someone, the more we shut the doors between us”. In suspending the tension of their reunion he perfectly prolongs that spot between agony and ecstasy. In short, “Find Me” gave me all the feels (as the kids say.) It’s a story that encourages deep reflection and slightly mournful yearning for that moment of discovery when someone you meet completely unhinges you and arouses all the passion of new love.