Find Me
A TOP TEN SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER
-
-
3.9 • 157 Ratings
-
-
- £7.49
Publisher Description
**THE GENTLEMAN FROM PERU - THE NEW NOVEL FROM ANDRE ACIMAN - IS AVAILABLE NOW**
In this spellbinding new exploration of the varieties of love, the author of Call Me by Your Name lets us back into his characters' lives years after their first meeting
In Find Me, Aciman shows us Elio's father, Samuel, on a trip from Florence to Rome to visit Elio, now a gifted classical pianist. A chance encounter on the train upends Sami's visit and changes his life forever.
Elio soon moves to Paris, where he, too, has a consequential affair, while Oliver, 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 nuances of emotion that are the substance of passion. Find Me brings us back inside the world of one of our greatest contemporary romances to show us that in fact true love never dies.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
There are some literary love stories we spend years hoping to revisit. So it’s with great excitement (and a huge dollop of gratitude to André Aciman) that we sat down for our reunion with Elio and Oliver. Few books have captured the magic of first love quite like 2011’s Call Me By Your Name and Find Me manages to bottle the intangible, enduring power of that fledgling love. We fast-forward several years: Elio is now a successful classical pianist in Rome and Oliver a New England college professor with a family. Aciman shows great skill and patience in painting the intricate stories of their lives across several before finally bringing the two together. These are characters we know so well and love so much: and they are done justice here beautifully.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.)
Customer Reviews
A flawed, but ultimately touching and interesting sequel
If you get over the jarring feeling of not reuniting with Elio and Oliver from the get go, then the book offers some truly fascinating observations on aging, regret, true love and philosophy. Still, the text remains to be somewhat clumsy at certain points, and characters threaten to become mere tools for delivering monologues, the story nevertheless can and will engage if you liked the predecessor.
Intelligent and Poignant
I feel as an avid fan of both the book and the film “Call Me By Your Name” this book was released purely for the benefit of closure- especially surrounding the film adaptation. As easy as it is racing to the end of the novel just to see what happens to Elio and Oliver, this book also teaches us a valuable lesson about people, and their relationship with time.
The book takes place over a number of years in which the reader manages to catch up on what happened after and in between the last two chapters of “Call Me By Your Name” but Aciman has created characters so flawlessly candid and amicable it is as though the reader is catching up with close friends or family- people we relate to and want to read about so willingly, that by the end of the book we feel like we are living alongside the story of “Find Me” and all its hidden treasures.
Aciman has managed to rouse the same dialogue and memoirs from the first book so delicately and with such sharp poignancy that we go straight back to “Somewhere in Northern Italy” at the right time, but “Find Me” also makes the reader grieve and mature through its chapters so much so, that this is such a special book to read whether you’ve lived through its predecessor or not.
A wonderful follow on…
Was a pleasure to return to the characters of Call me by your Name…
Written beautifully, poetically and perfectly.