find me andre aciman book review

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Find Me by André Aciman review – a beautiful conclusion for Elio and Oliver

The author of Call Me By Your Name returns to his beloved characters in a deeply romantic, philosophical sequel

A ndré Aciman’s 2007 breakthrough novel, Call Me By Your Name – later made into an award-winning film directed by Luca Guadagnino – told the story of a blossoming romance between 17-year-old Elio and 24-year-old Oliver. Exploring themes of passion, obsession and time, the book has since acquired the status of a modern gay classic.

In Find Me , Aciman returns to the lives of Elio and Oliver some 20 years later, albeit via a circuitous route: we have to wait until almost halfway through the novel for Elio’s first appearance, and are not reacquainted with Oliver until the penultimate section. But what Aciman offers us in the meantime is an intense and rewarding prelude.

The opening section finds Elio’s father, Samuel, on a train from Florence to Rome, sharing a carriage with a beautiful young photographer, Miranda. The two begin talking and soon discover a deep connection. Within hours, in spite of the age difference between them, they are planning a life together: “I’ll know that whatever time you’ve given me, my entire life… was all leading up to you.”

The second section finds Elio embarking on a new relationship with an older man, Michel, in a clear parallel to his father’s relationship with Miranda. But Elio, a concert pianist, cannot silence the echo of his first great love, Oliver: “so many years could go by and leave me still attached to someone who had become an invisible presence”.

Oliver himself, meanwhile, is in an unhappy marriage, ruminating over his love affair with Elio, and it is not until the last section that Aciman delivers their long-awaited, inevitable reunion.

Find Me is an unashamedly romantic and philosophical novel. Characters fall in love with one another’s discourse, with topics ranging from literature and music to notions of time, desire and fate: “time is always the price we pay for the unlived life”. And yet Aciman manages, by immersing us in their emotional dynamics, to present this intellectual sparring without pretentiousness.

Fathers – and their enduring influence – loom large. Miranda is the primary carer for her father; their relationship is devoid of the delusions that often cloud familial relationships. Likewise, Samuel’s relationship with Elio is based on mutual love and respect: “We never had any secrets, you and I, you know about me, and I know about you. In this I consider myself the luckiest son on earth.” Michel, Elio’s lover, obsesses over his dead father, while in the novel’s tender conclusion, Elio realises that fatherhood can come in many different guises.

But at its core, Find Me is a study in love: not only the love we dare to embrace but the love that exists in the parallel lives we lack the courage to explore.

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Find Me, the Call Me By Your Name sequel, is tender, melancholy, and deeply flawed

In André Aciman’s new novel, Elio and Oliver reunite at last. Eventually.

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Call Me By Your Name is a book that throbs with desire. André Aciman’s 2007 novel (and the basis for the 2017 film of the same title ) is a portrait of adolescent love and lust, experienced for the first time with an intensity that’s almost frightening in how all-consuming it feels. And Aciman devotes himself to chronicling every fleeting fantasy, every caress, with a fervor that matches what his characters are feeling.

Find Me , Aciman’s new sequel to Call Me By Your Name , is gentler and more melancholy than its predecessor. It’s not about first love but about true love, and specifically true love that is marred by lives lived out of sync. It’s about loving someone at exactly the wrong moment in time and finding your way through everything that follows regardless.

Elio and Oliver, the lovers from Call Me By Your Name , are the couple at the heart of Find Me , just as they were the heart of the earlier book. Their connection was both first love and true love, and the fact that their parting was a matter of timing is what gives Find Me its thematic weight: Their romance came at the wrong time — Elio was 17 and Oliver 24, and shortly after they said goodbye Oliver decided to marry a woman — and now both of them are living with the consequences.

But it takes a long time for Aciman to find his way back to Elio and Oliver. Find Me is a four-act book, and the first and longest act — set 10 years after the events of Call Me By Your Name — is about Elio’s father Samuel and his budding romance with a woman named Miranda who is half his age. Elio takes over as the point-of-view character in the second act after a five-year time jump, and Oliver in the third after another time jump. However, it’s not until the fourth act that the two lovers are finally reunited.

That delay is effective at building tension. But it’s also frustrating, because it means we spend a lot of time with Samuel and Miranda as Aciman hammers home his chosen themes. And Samuel and Miranda are not particularly interesting characters.

Almost all of Aciman’s characters talk like horny philosophy textbooks. Sometimes it works better than others.

Samuel and Miranda spend most of their time on the page together navigating the age gap between them, and it’s clear that for Aciman, that gap is not incidental. It’s a key to the theme of Find Me : Samuel and Miranda have met each other at the wrong moment in time, because for most of Samuel’s life, Miranda either was not born or was too young, and so although they were meant for one another their circumstances kept them apart, and now they will have only the end of Samuel’s life together.

It’s a romantic notion, and Aciman writes it in his most exalted, lyrical prose, letting his characters pile one destiny-driven vow on top of another in cascading sentences: “There will be no sorrow from me, and none from you,” Samuel tells Miranda, “because you’ll know as I’ll know that whatever time you’ve given me, my entire life, from childhood, school years, university, my years as a professor, a writer, and all the rest that happened was all leading up to you.”

But the age difference between them also means Aciman is doubling down on the age gap between Elio and Oliver in Call Me By Your Name , which was significant enough to cause a controversy during the film adaptation’s Oscar campaign. And the age difference feels all the more pointed in Find Me , because where Elio and Oliver were fully distinct characters with coherent psychologies and opposing points of view, Miranda and Samuel exist only as shallow outlines: Samuel represents wise and cosmopolitan age and Miranda is his perfect reflection in a young and vigorous body. That is the dynamic that Aciman seems interested in to the exclusion of all else, and the second time he writes it, it’s less convincing than the first.

Because Samuel and Miranda aren’t real characters, when they settle into the quasi-symposium that in Aciman’s worldview is the natural prelude to sex, their rapport doesn’t quite ring true. Which is surprising, because usually those symposiums work for Aciman even when they shouldn’t.

Nearly all of Aciman’s characters speak in philosophical paragraphs that aren’t meant to resemble normal human speech patterns so much as create an opportunity for Aciman to throw ideas around: In Aciman’s novels, discourse is what creates the possibility for sex, so sex is always both preceded and followed by debates about eros and art and the body.

And Aciman generally writes those debates with an endearing disregard for the rules of psychological realism like “show don’t tell.” With the occasional exception of Oliver, all of Aciman’s characters know exactly how they feel at any given moment and are more than happy to explain it to one another in exacting, precise detail. Those explanations rarely feel realistic, but when Oliver and Elio were delivering them to each other in both Call Me By Your Name and toward the end of Find Me , they were so drenched in emotion that I was more than willing to go along for the ride.

But the emotion never quite comes through with Samuel and Miranda, because Aciman hasn’t made the effort to turn them into more than flat types. As a result, their symposiums feel like just that: symposiums, without the undercurrent of love and desire and fear that made Elio and Oliver’s symposiums so compelling.

Things improve slightly in Find Me ’s second act, when Elio takes center stage as the point-of-view character, bringing with him an air of self-deprecation that goes a long way toward making all of his speechifying palatable. He’s now in his 30s, and in a continuation of the age difference theme, he’s falling in love with a man who is twice his age.

Elio’s new partner is named Michel, and he is the only person in Elio’s life who can compare to Oliver: “There’s only been the two of you,” Elio tells Michel. “All the others were occasionals. You have given me days that justify the years I’ve been without him.” Both Michel and Elio know that Oliver is Elio’s true love, but in the 15 years since Call Me By Your Name , Elio has been able to live his life openly and unapologetically enough to find a runner-up second love.

Oliver, who finally makes his first appearance in the third act, has not been so lucky. Because he chose to reject Elio and with Elio his true self, he hasn’t been able to make an authentic connection with anyone since their parting 20 years ago. He is amicable with his wife because they make a good team, and he half-heartedly pursues trysts with friends of both genders. But when a house guest plays for him the same piano piece that Elio played for him in Call Me By Your Name , Oliver is overcome with memories of Elio. “I knew,” he thinks, “that some arcane and beguiling wording was being spoken about what my life had been, and might still be, or might never be, and that the choice rested on the keyboard itself and me.”

It’s in Oliver’s storyline that Find Me delivers its most achingly lovely passages, because Oliver is the only one of Aciman’s characters who is capable of self-deception, who does not always know immediately and instinctively which of his feelings to trust and how to give voice to them. That makes Oliver’s arc a tragedy, but it also means that only in his narration are multiple layers of emotion allowed to exist and mingle moodily on the page together.

It takes until the novel’s fourth and final act for Oliver and Elio to finally meet on the page in a tender, lyrical epilogue that is the culmination of all the meditation on wasted time that came before. Since all Aciman’s readers really want is to see Oliver and Elio together again, all that came before this reunion made for a frustrating and occasionally clumsy wait — but the payoff makes you feel every bit of the years of separation both characters had to live through, waiting for their lives to sync up once again.

And as the pair comes together, Aciman’s prose is no longer filled with the all-consuming passion that animated Call Me By Your Name . Instead, he narrates their encounter with a sweetness and tentativeness that fits this gentle, melancholy book.

“Time,” says Oliver, and Elio understands “that what he’d meant was that too much time had gone by.” But soon, Elio realizes that “despite two decades we were not a day older than the two young men we’d been so long ago.”

What makes Find Me work, when it does work, is that it allows you to feel both of those concepts at once: Time goes by, terrible and insurmountable — and also it doesn’t matter at all.

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by André Aciman ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 29, 2019

An elegant, memorable story of enduring love across the generations.

Aciman ( Eight White Nights , 2010, etc.) picks up the storyline of his best-known novel to trace the lives of its actors 20 years on.

In Aciman’s breakthrough novel, Call Me By Your Name , the young protagonist, Elio, is reassured by his father that there’s no wrong or shame in loving another man—in this instance, a visiting American named Oliver. In this sequel, Sami, the father, is the man freshly in love, 10 years later. Southbound for Rome on a train that takes forever to arrive, he falls into easy, sometimes-teasing conversation with young Miranda, who cuts to the chase after a few dozen pages by saying, “When was the last time you were with a girl my age who’s not exactly ugly and who is desperately trying to tell you something that should have been quite obvious by now." Indeed, and love blossoms, complete with intellectual repartee with Miranda’s bookish, sophisticated father. Fathers indeed loom large in Aciman’s tale: Though sometimes far from the scene, they reverberate, as with the father of Michel, an older man to whom Elio becomes attached in the second part of the novel. Does he miss his late father, Elio asks, to which Michel replies, “Miss him? Not really. Maybe because, unlike my mother who died eight years ago, he never really died for me. He’s just absent.” Of a philosophical bent, Michel ponders wisely on the differences between his younger and older selves, prompting Elio to recall his one great love. Somehow, perhaps not entirely believably, Oliver, well established back home in the States, receives that brainwave (“ It’s me, isn’t it, it’s me you’re looking for… ”), for, with quiet regrets, he ends a long marriage and makes his way back into the past—the future, that is—to find Elio once again. Aciman blends assuredly mature themes with deep learning in which the likes of Bach and Cavafy and several languages grace the proceedings, and his story is touching without being sentimental even if some of it is too neatly inevitable.

Pub Date: Oct. 29, 2019

ISBN: 978-0-374-15501-8

Page Count: 272

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Review Posted Online: July 27, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2019

LITERARY FICTION

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by André Aciman

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THE MOST FUN WE EVER HAD

by Claire Lombardo ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 25, 2019

Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet...

Four Chicago sisters anchor a sharp, sly family story of feminine guile and guilt.

Newcomer Lombardo brews all seven deadly sins into a fun and brimming tale of an unapologetically bougie couple and their unruly daughters. In the opening scene, Liza Sorenson, daughter No. 3, flirts with a groomsman at her sister’s wedding. “There’s four of you?” he asked. “What’s that like?” Her retort: “It’s a vast hormonal hellscape. A marathon of instability and hair products.” Thus begins a story bristling with a particular kind of female intel. When Wendy, the oldest, sets her sights on a mate, she “made sure she left her mark throughout his house—soy milk in the fridge, box of tampons under the sink, surreptitious spritzes of her Bulgari musk on the sheets.” Turbulent Wendy is the novel’s best character, exuding a delectable bratty-ness. The parents—Marilyn, all pluck and busy optimism, and David, a genial family doctor—strike their offspring as impossibly happy. Lombardo levels this vision by interspersing chapters of the Sorenson parents’ early lean times with chapters about their daughters’ wobbly forays into adulthood. The central story unfurls over a single event-choked year, begun by Wendy, who unlatches a closed adoption and springs on her family the boy her stuffy married sister, Violet, gave away 15 years earlier. (The sisters improbably kept David and Marilyn clueless with a phony study-abroad scheme.) Into this churn, Lombardo adds cancer, infidelity, a heart attack, another unplanned pregnancy, a stillbirth, and an office crush for David. Meanwhile, youngest daughter Grace perpetrates a whopper, and “every day the lie was growing like mold, furring her judgment.” The writing here is silky, if occasionally overwrought. Still, the deft touches—a neighborhood fundraiser for a Little Free Library, a Twilight character as erotic touchstone—delight. The class calibrations are divine even as the utter apolitical whiteness of the Sorenson world becomes hard to fathom.

Pub Date: June 25, 2019

ISBN: 978-0-385-54425-2

Page Count: 544

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: March 3, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019

LITERARY FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP

SEEN & HEARD

HOUSE OF LEAVES

by Mark Z. Danielewski ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 6, 2000

The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...

An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.

Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad.  The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized).  As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest ) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses).  Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture.  Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."

Pub Date: March 6, 2000

ISBN: 0-375-70376-4

Page Count: 704

Publisher: Pantheon

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000

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BookBrowse Reviews Find Me by Andre Aciman

Summary  |  Excerpt  |  Reading Guide  |  Discuss  |  Reviews  |  Beyond the book  |  Read-Alikes  |  Genres & Themes  |  Author Bio

by Andre Aciman

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André Aciman provides snapshots from the stories of Elio, Oliver and Samuel ten years after the events of Call Me by Your Name in this sequel with broad appeal as a standalone.

In Call Me by Your Name , first published in 2007, André Aciman introduced Elio, an adolescent boy living with his family in the Italian Riviera, and Oliver, the charming graduate student houseguest with whom he falls in love. The book charts their passionate affair and concludes with a bittersweet crescendo; a tricky ending to expand into a sequel without sacrificing the perfect balance of realism and romanticism that caused Call Me by Your Name to resonate with so many readers.  Find Me not only rises to that challenge but exceeds it. While a prior attachment to these characters is arguably necessary to get the full emotional payoff of the sequel, it could otherwise be read as a standalone; knowledge of the first book's plot is not essential. Find Me reads like a frenzied fairytale; it's every bit as indulgent and beguiling as its predecessor, though it asks more of its readers' patience. Anyone picking it up hungry to dive back into Elio and Oliver's story will first have to abide a detour through a novella-length chapter about Elio's father, Samuel, who meets a charismatic young woman, Miranda, on a train to Rome. Set ten years after the events of Call Me By Your Name , it's an opening that suggests this book might eschew the youthful headiness of Aciman's previous novel—the narrator is much older, and the conversation that unfolds between Samuel and Miranda is at first measured and guarded. However, their chance meeting escalates into something intense and ardent as they engage in a mutually idyllic love affair that slowly but surely pulls the reader back into the throes of passion reminiscent of the affair between Elio and Oliver. Though this chapter isn't the most natural segue from the ending of the previous book, it ties up a loose end for one of the more subtly tragic characters, and also charts the thematic course for what's to follow. The existence of fate is a question that dogs each of the characters through their narratives. Samuel and Miranda, for example, wonder how they might have gone on with their mundane lives if they hadn't spoken to each other on the train. Samuel's passionate desire to reclaim the love and lust that were lost from his life mirrors Elio's own melancholic journey, searching in all his prospective partners for the spark that was ignited by Oliver. Find Me isn't so much about moving forward as it is about moving back in time, recreating lost passion, reigniting lost flames. Subsequent to Samuel and Miranda's story, which only touches the periphery of Elio's, we finally get to revisit Call Me by Your Name 's chief protagonists—first Elio, then Oliver. Each of the novel's four chapters is shorter than the one that came before, each a dizzying vignette that chronicles a brief period of the character's adulthood, laying out their overarching dissatisfaction that stems from aching for a relationship that ended over a decade ago. This isn't the kind of wish-fulfilling sequel where the long-lost lovers fall into each other's arms on the second page and carry out a fantasy of a relationship, and it's destined to disappoint anyone who expects that of it. Instead, Aciman revisits these characters in order to ask deeper questions of his readers. Can the euphoria of first love ever be recreated? Is it worth sacrificing something sturdy to chase after something fleeting? Was what Elio and Oliver had in Call Me By Your Name any less real simply because it was so brief? Find Me is perhaps more contemplative than its predecessor, but ultimately no less enchanting, and arguably even more affecting. The unhappiness, emotional distance, and unspent desire that these characters must first grapple with in order to attain closure makes the conclusion all the more gratifying.

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Find Me (Aciman)

Find Me   Andre Aciman, 2019 Farrar, Straus & Giroux 272 pp. ISBN-13: 9780374155018 Summary In this spellbinding exploration of the varieties of love, the author of the worldwide bestseller Call Me by Your Name revisits its complex and beguiling characters decades after their first meeting . No novel in recent memory has spoken more movingly to contemporary readers about the nature of love than Andre Aciman’s haunting Call Me by Your Name . First published in 2007, it was hailed as "a love letter, an invocation… an exceptionally beautiful book" (Stacey D’Erasmo, The New York Times Book Review ). Nearly three quarters of a million copies have been sold, and the book became a much-loved, Academy Award–winning film starring Timothee Chalamet as the young Elio and Armie Hammer as Oliver, the graduate student with whom he falls in love. In Find Me , Aciman shows us Elio’s father, Samuel, on a trip from Florence to Rome to visit Elio, who has become a gifted classical pianist. A chance encounter on the train with a beautiful young woman upends Sami’s plans and changes his life forever. Elio soon moves to Paris, where he, too, has a consequential affair, while Oliver, now 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 emotional nuances that are the substance of passion. Find Me brings us back inside the magic circle of one of our greatest contemporary romances to ask if, in fact, true love ever dies. ( From the publisher .)

Author Bio • Birth—January 2, 1951 • Where—Alexandria, Egypt; Rome, Italy • Education—B.A., Lehman College; M.A., Ph.D., Harvard University • Awards—Whiting Award, Lambda Literary Award • Currently—lives in New York, New York, USA Andre Aciman ( as-i man ) is an Egyptian-Italian-American writer. He is the author of several novels, including Call Me by Your Name (2007) and its sequel Find Me (2020).  In 1995, he published his memoir Out of Egypt , which won the Whiting Award, and which The New York Times compared to the styles of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Lawrence Durrell, and Anton Chekkov. Background and career Aciman was born in Alexandria, Egypt, and raised in a multi-lingual family that spoke primarly French but also Italian, Greek, Ladino, and Arabic. His parents were Sephardic Jews, of Turkish and Italian origin, whose families had settled in Alexandria in 1905. Because increased tensions with Israel put Jews in a precarious position, his family left Egypt in 1965. After his father purchased Italian citizenship for the family, Aciman moved with his mother and brother to Rome while his father moved to Paris. In 1968 the family moved to New York City. From there, Aciman attended Lehman College. He went on to earn an M.A. and Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Harvard University. Currently, Aciman is distinguished professor at the Graduate Center of City University of New York, where he teaches the history of literary theory and the works of Marcel Proust. He previously taught creative writing at New York University and French literature at Princeton and Bard College. He lives with his wife and three sons in New York. ( Adapted from Wikipedia. Retreived 4/9/2020 .)

Book Reviews [Find Me ] is a lyrical meditation on being forced to move to another location after the party’s over, on the Sisyphean task of trying to replicate the magic of young passion…. [I]t strikes an affectingly melancholy chord. Josh Duboff - New York Times Book Review Aciman’s quiet, label-free presentation of bisexual life represents a minor triumph…. Likewise, his refusal to offer easy resolution, which infuses the whole romantic enterprise with a kind of delicious melancholy. There are moments, particularly in the final chapter, that may have readers gazing tearfully into their fireplaces, real or imaginary, just like Timothee Chalamet at the end of Luca Guadagnino’s superlative film of Call Me by Your Name . Charles Arrowsmith - Washington Post Aciman writes about desire with blunt honesty, describing erotic and emotional interactions with equal clarity. Sex can be tender or not, the connection lasting or ephemeral, but it is almost always multilayered and complex. Clea Simon - Boston Globe With all of the richly painted details, emotional nuance, and deeply affecting romance as the first installment, this book will draw you in and make you believe in love again. Good Housekeeping The elegant sequel to Aciman’s celebrated first novel, Call Me by Your Name , revisits his best-known characters some 20 years later.… The novel again demonstrates Aciman’s capacity to fuse the sensual and the cerebral in stories that touch the heart. Publishers Weekly ( Starred review )  Aciman's incandescent sequel to the acclaimed Call Me by Your Name.… [ Find Me is] a beautiful 21st-century romance that reflects on the remembrance of things past and the courage to embrace the future. Highly recommended. — Sally Bissell, formerly with Lee Cty. Lib. Syst., Fort Myers, FL Library Journal ( Starred review ) Call Me By Your Name was widely praised for its treatment of the nature of love, a theme that Find Me continues with subtlety and grace. Its treatment of the characters' psychology is astute and insightful… [Will the] star-crossed lovers reunite…. One can only hope. Booklist Aciman blends assuredly mature themes with deep learning… and his story is touching without being sentimental even if some of it is too neatly inevitable. An elegant, memorable story of enduring love across the generations. Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions 1. The book begins with a conversation between Miranda and Samuel, who are strangers. What is your first impression of them? What are the similarities and differences in attitudes, beliefs, and experiences that draw them to each other? What are the critical moments in the development of their relationship? Why might Aciman have chosen this opening, given that the story ultimately belongs to Elio and Oliver? 2. Who is the "Me" of the book’s title? Might there be more than one? What does it mean to be found? How are the themes of love, loss, and loneliness explored in each section? 3. Miranda’s father is editing a dissertation that contains parables, which he says prove that "life and time are not in sync" and that we all "have many lives." How is each character’s story a parable about how time and life are not in sync? How does each have many lives? 4. What is a vigil? What are the vigils that Samuel and Elio are looking forward to in Rome? How does Miranda’s presence affect their experience? Are there other significant vigils in the book? 5. How are Elio and Michel, in the early stages of their love affair, like Samuel and Miranda? What vigils do they establish? What are the differences between the two couples? 6. When Michel asks his father, Adrien, who Leon was, his father replies, "You’re making me remember, and I don’t want to remember." What is the significance of the story of Adrien and Leon and the musical score, the cadenza, that Adrien leaves to his son? Is there a message hidden in Leon’s work? Why is Elio determined to help Michel discover who Leon was and how he died? In the end, does Michel find out what his father didn’t want to remember? 7. What is a canard? Why is it the word Michel chooses to describe Oliver’s marriage? Is it meant to be ironic? Are there other canards in the characters’ lives? 8. The story of Elio and Oliver is revealed gradually. What do we learn about them in each section? How did Elio’s experience of first love as a boy shape the man he has become? What do we know of Oliver’s life in the years after he left Elio in Italy? What does Oliver’s infatuation with Erica and Paul tell us about him? What happens in the time between the events of "Capriccio" and "DaCapo"? 9. How are the different stages of life—youth, middle age, and old age—depicted? How does a character’s age influence his or her beliefs about life, love, and death? Why does Miranda tell Samuel that "none of it would have happened if you were thirty years old?" How does Michel describe the differences between his younger and older selves? 10. Samuel and Miranda, and Elio and Michel, meet entirely by chance. In the relationships that develop between each couple, as well as Oliver’s fantasy relationship with Erica and Paul, what are the moments, words, or gestures that suggest the possibility of deeper connections? 11. Which of the characters believe in the power of fate to alter the course of a life? How does fate or chance impact each of them? How do the lyrics of the Brazilian song that Elio translates for Michel resonate throughout the book? 12. Does Elio fall in love with Michel? Has Oliver ever loved anyone except Elio? Why does love come so easily to Samuel and Miranda? In general, what lessons does the book teach us about love? To whom is it available? What sacrifices does it require? 13. Miranda’s father says, "I want those who outlive me to extend my life, not just to remember it." Michel tells Elio, "Nothing belongs to the past." How are past and present intertwined and what are the consequences? By the end of the book, how have the lives of the deceased been extended into the present? Why does Elio feel that his half brother is his and Oliver’s child, and that his father "knew it just as well, had known it all along?" 14. What is the significance of each section title? For example, "Tempo," the title of the first section, is a musical term meaning the speed at which a passage of music is or should be played. It is also the Italian word for time. How do both meanings resonate? What are the meanings of the other section titles? How are the themes of time and music interrelated? 15. Find Me is a romance, a tragicomic novel that spans generations, with themes of separation and reunion, exile, and jealousy. What are the moments of tragedy in the book? Of comedy? How else do the stories of Samuel and Miranda, Elio and Michel, and Elio and Oliver work as romance? What are other stories of lovers reunited after years of separation? ( Questions issued by the publisher .) top of page (summary)

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This week, Josh Duboff reviews André Aciman’s “Find Me,” the sequel to his 2007 novel “Call Me by Your Name.” In 1995, Barry Unsworth wrote for the Book Review about “Out of Egypt,” Aciman’s memoir chronicling the family that shaped his life.

André Aciman’s “Out of Egypt” follows the fortunes of a close-knit Jewish family — the author’s own — through 50 years of residence in Alexandria, beginning with arrival from Turkey in 1905 and ending with expulsion, in the long wave of anti-Semitism and Arab nationalism that followed the 1956 invasion of Suez. Mr. Aciman calls his book a memoir, which in its basic meaning is a record of events written from the personal knowledge of the writer. Because of this personal element, because it is written as much about others as about oneself, it comes closer to fiction than almost any other prose form.

People engage a deeper level of interest in us not through their eccentricity or flamboyance, but because of the quality of their humanity. It is not the boastful and versatile Uncle Vili, by turns soldier, swindler and spy, whom we mainly remember from this book, but Aunt Flora, who played Schumann those summer nights and who ended alone and embittered in Venice. It is Mr. Aciman’s great achievement that he has re-created a world gone forever now, and given us an ironical and affectionate portrait of those who were exiled from it.

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Book Review: André Aciman’s Find Me

Attention all CMBYN fans: Do NOT Read the Sequel. It Will Kill You.

Ohr Gutman , Community and Social Issues Editor March 26, 2020

Levels of boredom have climaxed across the board during this first week of quarantine. I could give you some pointers about how to fill your time, but instead I’m going to tell you what absolutely NOT to do: do not read Find Me , the tragically disappointing sequel to Call Me By Your Name . 

It gives me no joy to say this. Fan clubs are known to joke that all “stans” of the original novel are, by default, either gay or depressed. I, being neither, can just appreciate a work of art when I see one. And that’s what Call Me By Your Name is: a masterpiece. Its raw, honest illustration of adolescent love and lust managed to captivate the hearts of an entire generation like no other book. The 2007 publication of the novel sparked a widespread, cult-like obsession that peaked with the release of the movie adaptation in 2017 at the SunDance film festival, finally cementing its unchallenged presence in pop culture. 

The Call Me By Your Name fan base is incredibly active, not to mention enormous. The tragic ending left some of us feeling just as heartbroken as Elio, robbed of the future that he and Oliver seemed destined to have. This created a hunger for a second book. But, the tragic ending was necessary to the integrity of Call Me By Your Name ; it was about first love, not true love. A good sequel deepens the meaning of the original. To me, Find Me seems like André Aciman’s follow-up attempt to appease his fans and not a genuinely written continuation of his original masterpiece (forgive me, André, I love you). 

Find Me opens up its first section, called “Tempo”, and a fast-paced one at that, with a perspective switch to a first person account of Elio’s deeply empathetic and intuitive father, Samuel. By the end of the first novel, he reveals to his son that he never experienced real love, not even during his marriage to Elio’s mother. Now divorced and alone, he meets a young (over a decade younger than he) Miranda on a train to Rome. Their spontaneous connection erupts out of innocent small talk, stimulated by probing questions and philosophical conversation, and into professing their love for one another all within a 24 hour period. Her flippant attitude with past loves compliments his discouragingly unpassionate history, making it easy for them to seize the day and not let anything slip away. Within the week, they decide to spend the rest of their lives together and immediately have a child. Carpe diem, I guess? 

These characters, their romance, just feels so forced. None of it can be real. Their all too casual deep dives into philosophical theory do not represent normal human conversation, but rather the author’s opportunity to throw around his own ideas, breaking the age-old rule of “show don’t tell”. What used to be raw, tangible emotion in elegant prose now feels like a bad script ripped right out of the hands of a cheesy rom-com, or at times, even pornography. The sex writing in CMBYN was meaningful and served a grander purpose; Find Me’s seem like Aciman projecting his own sexual fantasies onto paper. What used to be carefully crafted characters and relationships turned into outwardly deep outlines of people and interpersonal developments that are really just shallow. 

Their whirlwind romance prompts the theme that prevails throughout the rest of the novel: a cycle of older selves reflecting and acting upon a desire to recapture their youth. 

Five years later, Elio seizes control of the narrative in the second act called “Cadenza”. Musically speaking, cadenzas denote a solo passage of virtuosic skill in a “free” rhythmic style, emblematic of Elio’s detached performance of love while with a new man, Michel, and their romance that is contrastingly more quaint than the tornado that is his father’s and Miranda’s. Now an accomplished pianist in Paris, he meets Michel (double Elio’s age) who falls in love with Elio instantly. This section centers around a mysterious piece of music Michel’s father posthumously left for him. They discover that the Jewish Kaddish is subliminally written within the notes, inserted by a man sent to a concentration camp during WWII that left this to Michel’s father as a token of his identity and symbol of their love affair. This is where Aciman hammers home the point that the only constant in life is change; people grow into and moult out of countless skins, each identity gone unknown even to those closest to them. “I suspect we have first selves and second selves and perhaps third, fourth, and fifth selves and many more in between” Aciman communicates through Michel. 

Let’s take a step back, please. The connection to Judaism is seamless in CMBYN; Elio’s struggle with his religious identity is confronted when he discovers Oliver wearing a Star of David necklace so openly. Elio’s “mother says we are Jews of discretion”, but through Oliver he can access that part of himself more positively. In Find Me, it seems so… random. It seems so… criminally irrelevant. So fabricated. So shoved in there. Again, with the authenticity. If it’s just me that’s missing something here, enlighten me. But thanks anyway, André, fellow brother, from the bottom of my heart for the shoutout to the Jewish community. Means a lot. 

Michel loves Elio the way Elio still loves Oliver, so he ends their relationship and flies to America in hopes of reuniting with Oliver. 

The lens is readjusted yet again in the third and shortest section “Capriccio”, narrated through Oliver. Unhappily married, he explores his attraction to both a male and female guest at the moving-away party he throws for himself. Because he so long ago chose to reject Elio and with Elio his true self, he hasn’t made a genuine connection with anyone since. A colleague performs a song on the piano that he instantly recognizes to be the same capriccio Elio played for him 20 years ago, somewhere in northern Italy, 1983. Memories come flooding back and he realizes he must end this version of himself and go home to Elio. 

It is Oliver’s storyline that holds the most weight in all of the novel. He seems to be the single character capable of having multiple layers of emotion, who does not always know exactly what or how he feels in any given moment, and does not speak in unrealistically precise philosophical paragraphs. He prompts deeper analysis.

Titled “Da Capo”, the final section of Find Me takes on the literal meaning of the Italian translation of the musical term: from the beginning. Aciman’s repeated motif of the cyclical pattern of life is proven true; after much accumulated suspense, Elio and Oliver find eachother once again. Elio rightfully regains control of the narrative, now living in the same villa from CMBYN following the death of his father. Miranda lives with him, too, along with the child Samuel fathered. The child’s name: Oliver. 

Yes; yes, Elio’s father named his new son, Elio’s half-brother, Oliver, after the man who prompted his other son’s, Elio’s, sexual awakening, who was his first and most epic love. Elio now had an older lover and younger brother named Oliver. Yes, that happened. And, because the child Oliver has to grow up fatherless, Elio and his LOVER Oliver, vow to take care of him as a symbol of their never ending love. 

It’s all too easy; and too weird! Need I go on?

What I did enjoy about this section was the contrast between the pair’s narration as compared to CMBYN. The pages no longer almost burst with an all-consuming passion, but read a certain rhythm of tenderness that fit the gentler tone of Find Me. Their years spent in separation had a definite presence between the two, but came crashing down as they synced up and seized hold of the bond they shared once again.

“Time,” says Oliver, and Elio understands “that what he’d meant was that too much time had gone by.” But, he also sees that “despite two decades we were not a day older than the two young men we’d been so long ago.”

The themes expressed in Find Me are absolutely beautiful; it is the way that the concepts are so shallowly made known that ruins their sentiment. The importance of the age difference between Aciman’s character’s is clear; each pair of partners could fit an entire lifetime within the gap. The notion of meeting the right person at the wrong stage of life, either because they were not born yet or were out of sync, is romantic and emblematic of the book’s cyclical portrayal of life. But where in CMBYN, Elio and Oliver were fully formed characters with vivacious and contrasting points of view, Samuel and Miranda only exist as perfect reflections of each other in old versus young bodies. There is no conflict, and therefore no discovery of character, emotion, or invokement of excitement or passion.The novel wants to be intimate and profound, but any emotion falls dead immediately after its expression; the characters are so flatly constructed, they barely qualify as outlines. 

There is a chance that Find Me will get its own movie adaptation. Honestly, even after all I said, I wouldn’t be totally against a sequel to the movie for the sole purpose of seeing Timothée Chalamet and Armie Hammer on the same screen, at the same time again. Because, come on. Nevertheless, I beg you, leave it alone! 

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Find Me, André Aciman | Book Review

Find Me opening lines: Why so glum? I watched her get on at the station in Florence. She slid open the glass door, and once inside the car, looked around, then right away dumped her backpack on the empty seat next to mine.

Samuel chooses an empty compartment on the train from Florence to Rome. He is on his way to visit his son Elio, a concert pianist. Miranda and her dog invade his space and this small intrusion leads to love. Neither of them are looking for it. Sami is old enough to be Miranda’s father, but they cannot avoid what the future holds for them.

Elio has left behind his first love. Now a classical pianist living in Paris, he believes his youthful desires are behind him – yet after a glancing encounter at a chamber music concert, he once again finds himself falling for an older man. At their affair intensifies, his thoughts turn to the pat, and to Oliver, whose presence in Elio’s heart has never dimmed. Oliver, a college professor, husband and father, is preparing to leave New York. The imminent departure stirs up longing and regret, awakening an old desire and propelling him towards a decision that could change everything.

My verdict:

I would suggest you read  Call Me By Your Name first, to make sense of this novel. It was an OK read but I would not rush out to buy it.

Publishing information:

ISBN 9780571356492

Disclosure: I was sent the book to review by Jonathan Ball Publishers . I was not required to write a positive review. This post is in line with my blogging policy .

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Published by Tandy

I am passionate about using regional, seasonable and sustainable produce when I cook. I live in Gordons Bay with my husband and dogs. We visit new places locally and overseas as often as we can to experience the food of the area. Follow along on our adventures! View all posts by Tandy

8 thoughts on “ Find Me, André Aciman | Book Review ”

Your final words are rather a shame, Tandy, as the topic of this book is promising.

It’s not worth buying. But let me know if you want to read it.

Too bad this isn’t a readable book. I’ve liked other work by André Aciman.

be well… mae at maefood.blogspot.com

Maybe if you have read the first one it will make it more readable 🙂

thank you for your honest review!

My pleasure!

It did sound very interesting!!!

I am still in two minds about it!

I would ♥ to hear from you (comments will be visible when I reply) Cancel reply

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Book and Film Globe

Books, Film, TV, Culture.

Love, Awfully

Call Me By Your Name…Again!

A sequel to the literary sensation Call Me By Your Name? That sounds like a bad idea, I thought. I was wrong. It turns out to be a positively dreadful idea. André Aciman’s new novel Find Me manages to be terrible in its own right and make you question your appreciation of the earlier book.

I saw the film version of Call Me By Your Name , starring Timothée Chalamet as the precocious and fawn-like 17-year-old Elio and Armie Hammer as Oliver, a supremely handsome 24-year-old grad student. Oliver takes Elio to his bed but is too afraid to take Elio to his heart. Also, Elio has sex with a peach.  It’s a bittersweet tale and while I didn’t like it nearly as much as others, I enjoyed it well enough.

Then I read the novel. It’s superior to the film in every way. Subtler and clearer at the same time, the novel accomplishes everything at which the movie clumsily hints. While the film was wise to focus the action on Elio’s symbolic summer of ’42, the book extends well into the future.

Aciman leaves us in no doubt about how to see this romance. The novel Call Me By Your Name is not a story of first love. It’s an earthshaking story of true love, a story of two people who should be together. But, alas, Oliver lacked the courage and it will never be.

Exciting and New

Well, forget all that! In a Jane Austen-like orgy of happy endings, Find Me doles out feel-good moments for all the men we cared about in the original novel. We nostalgically visit landmarks from the earlier novel and reminisce, which is just as embarrassing as it sounds. Characters who proved just this side of believable now turn into caricatures. People passionately in love become the sort of bores everyone else finds annoying. No one else has ever experienced such bliss, they insist, which is obnoxious whether they’re right or wrong. And with each plot twist insistently pointing towards joy and happiness, we grimace.

Aciman breaks up Find Me into four sections with pretentious musical titles. He titles the first “Tempo”, which in this case is quite slow, taking up nearly half the book. Here we follow Elio’s supremely understanding father Samuel. He divorced Elio’s mother because once their brilliant son left home, they realized the child was all they had in common.

Samuel is heading to Rome to visit Elio. On the train, he sits by an attractive but unhappy young woman who could be his daughter, or even granddaughter. Needless to say, they begin to chat and fall hopelessly in love.

Truly, it’s a miracle any novel depicts people in love with satisfaction. Here the annoyance trebles because Samuel is such a cliché–a much older man bewitched by a young woman. She’s so mature for her age, he marvels! She, in response, insists no one has ever understood her so completely the way he does!

In one whirlwind day, they meet, go to her ailing father to celebrate his birthday (needless to say, he’s delighted to meet a man as old as himself about to ravage his daughter), eat and drink and talk and talk, make love–her vagina is like a ripe fig; she dubs his erect penis “my lighthouse”–and threaten to get matching tattoos.

This is where I quote some risible dialogue to make you laugh at the awfulness of the text in Find Me. They’re making love and Aciman writes this very typical passage:

“She smiled and after touching herself, brought her damp hand to my face, to my cheek and my forehead: ‘I want you to smell of me.’ And she touched my lips, my tongue, my eyelids, and I kissed her deep in the mouth, which was a signal we both understood, for it was, from time immemorial, the gift of one human to another human.

“’Where did they invent you?’ I said when we were resting. What I meant to say was I didn’t know what life was before this. So I quoted Goethe again.”

Love, European Style

Find Me gets worse. Aciman dubs the second section Cadenza, though it lasts almost as long as Tempo. We watch as a 30-year-old Elio heads to Paris where he falls in love with an older man twice his age. Their romance takes days rather than minutes and involves classical-music concerts and lovely weekend getaways to homes maintained by discreet servants. Still, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.

Capriccio, in which Elio’s eternal love Oliver dallies with a younger man and woman at his going-away party, briskly follows. He’s barely spoken to them before this party but they implicitly understand he’d gladly bed them both. Each, of course, feels honored and finds the idea delightful. Yet all the while Oliver is hypnotically hearing the voice of Elio calling to him. The book ends emphatically with Da Capo, where every possible plotline is tied up neatly and wrapped in a bow.

As each impossibly joyful revelation followed the next, I winced. As Aciman turned a bittersweet story into the rom-com movie Love, Actually, I looked away in embarrassment. Maybe you enjoy Love, Actually .  But if they made a sequel and everyone ended up divorced, addicted to drugs, homeless or committing suicide, you might just wonder what the hell was going on.

(Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, October 29, 2019) 

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Michael Giltz is a freelance writer based in New York City covering all areas of entertainment, politics, sports and more. He has written extensively for the New York Post, New York Daily News, New York Magazine, The Advocate, Out, Huffington Post, Premiere Magazine, Entertainment Weekly, BookFilter, USA Today and the Los Angeles Times. He co-hosts the long-running podcast Showbiz Sandbox .

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In this spellbinding exploration of the varieties of love, the author of the worldwide bestseller Call Me by Your Name revisits its complex and beguiling characters decades after their first meeting.

No novel in recent memory has spoken more movingly to contemporary readers about the nature of love than André Aciman’s haunting  Call Me by Your Name . First published in 2007, it was hailed as “a love letter, an invocation . . . an exceptionally beautiful book” (Stacey D’Erasmo,  The New York Times Book Review ). Nearly three quarters of a million copies have been sold, and the book became a much-loved, Academy Award–winning film starring Timothée Chalamet as the young Elio and Armie Hammer as Oliver, the graduate student with whom he falls in love.

In  Find Me , Aciman shows us Elio’s father, Samuel, on a trip from Florence to Rome to visit Elio, who has become a gifted classical pianist. A chance encounter on the train with a beautiful young woman upends Sami’s plans and changes his life forever.

Elio soon moves to Paris, where he, too, has a consequential affair, while Oliver, now 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 emotional nuances that are the substance of passion.  Find Me  brings us back inside the magic circle of one of our greatest contemporary romances to ask if, in fact, true love ever dies.

Now a Major Motion Picture from Director Luca Guadagnino, Starring Armie Hammer and Timothée Chalamet, and Written by Three-Time Oscar Nominee James Ivory

The Basis of the Oscar-Winning Best Adapted Screenplay

Learn more at Sony Pictures Classics

An instant classic and one of the great love stories of our time.

André Aciman’s Call Me by Your Name  is the story of a sudden and powerful romance that blossoms between an adolescent boy and a summer guest at his parents’ cliffside mansion on the Italian Riviera. Each is unprepared for the consequences of their attraction, when, during the restless summer weeks, unrelenting currents of obsession, fascination, and desire intensify their passion and test the charged ground between them. Recklessly, the two verge toward the one thing both fear they may never truly find again: total intimacy. It is an instant classic and one of the great love stories of our time.

André Aciman's Other Books

André Aciman  

Tour announcement, united states and canada.

October 28 – New York, NY New York Public Library Stephen A. Schwarzman Building Moderated by Nicole Krauss 6:30pm More information , registration will open in September ​

October 29 – Brooklyn, NY Books Are Magic First Unitarian Congregational Society 7pm More information…

October 30 – Miami, FL Books & Books 8pm More information…

November 1 – Austin, TX Book People 7pm More information…

November 3 – Los Angeles, CA Writers Bloc Ahrya Fine Arts Theater by Laemmle In partnership with Book Soup 4pm More information…

November 4 – Seattle, WA Seattle Public Library and Elliott Bay Moderated by Dave Wheeler from Shelf Awareness 7pm More information…

November 5 – Portland, OR Powell’s Books 7:30pm More information will be available in early October on Powell’s events calendar

November 6 – San Francisco, CA City Arts & Lectures with Andrew Sean Greer and moderated by Steven Winn 7:30pm More information…

November 7 – Milwaukee, WI Boswell Book Company More information…

November 8 – Chicago, IL Unabridged Books at Nettelhorst School Auditorium Moderated by Rebecca Makkai 7pm More information…

November 9 – Ann Arbor, MI Literati Bookstore University of Michigan’s Rackham Theater 7pm More Information…

November 10 – Boston, MA Boston Public Library with Trident Booksellers 3pm More Information…

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Dec. 4 – New York, NY City University of New York 6:30pm More Information…

Dec. 9 – New York, NY 92nd Street Y Moderated by Parul Sehgal of the New York Times Book Review 8pm More Information…

Dec. 11 – Toronto, CAN Toronto International Film Festival Event and Film Screening Bell Lightbox 7:00pm More Information…

Jan. 16 – New York, NY National Arts Club Book Event and Dinner 6:30pm

Media and Speaking Inquiries Brianna Scharfenberg Publicist Farrar, Straus and Giroux/Picador [email protected]

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Call Me By Your Name author Andre Aciman tackles magic realism in newest Italian summer romance

SINGAPORE – Fans of Andre Aciman’s Call Me By Your Name (2007) – which was made into a hit movie featuring actors Timothee Chalamet and Armie Hammer – will love the Italian-American writer’s newest novella.

Aciman returns to a triptych of obsessions in The Gentleman From Peru: summer, desire and Italy. A group of college friends are marooned at a lavish hotel on the Amalfi Coast and encounter a mysterious stranger who reveals his power of clairvoyance.

“Put it this way, it is not an accident that I frequently write about Italy,” says the 73-year-old over Zoom from his New York apartment, surrounded by three packed shelves of books in his background.

There is a sparkle in Aciman’s eye whenever he mentions Italy, where he wrote the book.

The writer’s short-lived adolescence spent in Rome is also the subject of a forthcoming romantic memoir, My Roman Year, set to be published at the end of 2024. He was born in Alexandria, Egypt, but his Jewish family left for Rome in 1965.

The award-winning writer says of the allure of Italy, a place of inspiration: “The moment it is summer, there’s a beach – there’s always a beach – and there’s this kind of warmth between human beings and something comes that disinhibits people, suddenly something else takes over.”

The maestro of desire on the page admits that he keeps excavating the same themes. “It’s almost like a trademark that I’m embarrassed by – there’s always a new model of the Chevrolet, but it’s the same idea. It doesn’t let go of me and I hope it never does.”

In The Gentleman From Peru, Aciman transforms love into an otherworldly passion, an inexplicable force which brings stranded strangers together unknowingly.

Like in his other books such as Enigma Variations (2017), Aciman continues to conjure that ineffable dimension of love that he is known for in his prose.

“I don’t like the love that is basically – ‘We get along, we have a friendship, we feel this, we feel that’ – I don’t like that. That is of no interest to me. I like something that is intense, maybe it doesn’t last a long time, but it is intense and utterly intimate to the point where you are obsessed and essentially unable to focus on anything else.”

He adds with a smile: “When that happens, it’s heaven.”

It is this passionate intensity which drew bibliophiles and cinephiles to the story at the centre of Call Me By Your Name’s summer romance – a slow-burn dance of gay longing between a young Elio and a visiting scholar Oliver. Their fling ignites buried feelings and unspoken desires.

“All love – the kind that I write about – is ultimately a bit destructive,” Aciman says. “It means that life as you are living it now is not as important as what we have between us.

“There’s nothing better than to wash your towels and your laundry on a Sunday afternoon with somebody that you love. This is lovely, but it’s not intense the way I like it to be – there’s something totally different.”

This destructive view of desire, Aciman finds, is no longer popularly held today as many people prefer a more rational view of love.

He says: “I find that most people, if I can say this, fight against desire, fight against their love. They try to minimise it so that they can harness it and live with it – and I think that’s what we all do, it’s healthy. But remember, on Sundays, you wash the laundry with that person – that’s not interesting.”

These rational lovers, he finds, prefer to keep their windows shut, “whereas connecting is a way of throwing open the shutters of the window”.

He adds: “I don’t know whether you have shutters in Singapore, but in New York, we don’t have shutters. In Italy, there are shutters – you fling them open and say to the world, ‘Let the sun shine on me.’”

But The Gentleman From Peru also moves Aciman into new territory as it is his first flirtation with the form of magic realism. “People said to me, ‘Oh, you’re incapable of writing anything magical.’ So I decided that I was going to show them.”

He, however, admits that none of the magic realists – not even the pioneer of the form, Colombian novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez – really stick with him as his sensibility is much more French and he is predisposed to psychological situations.

Aciman says: “I like small apartments with not many rooms. People are sitting down in the living room and chatting. There’s not much going on – they’re not sick, they’re not drugged out, they are not drunks – there’s nothing really extraordinary happening in their lives and it’s all internal. And I love that, I’ve always loved that.”

On the other hand, the intoxication of love has always carried a scent of magic. “There is something about love that is so magical. Love gives every appearance of transcending a lifetime.”

When asked if he would like for the book to be adapted into a movie, Aciman says he has heard that the 74-year-old actor Bill Nighy, who featured in the films Living (2022) and Love Actually (2003), has expressed interest in the role of the book’s titular gentleman Raul.

While nothing is confirmed, Aciman says: “I would love it. It’s a wonderful experience – and it’s lovely because a book public is always restrained. But you have a movie and everybody knows about it.”

His attitude towards film adaptations of his books is one of letting go. “I’ve said what I have to say, now it’s their turn to do whatever they want. I think Call Me By Your Name was very well done to the point where I said to the director (Luca Guadagnino) that the ending of the movie is better than the ending of the book.”

Asked if he is still learning about desire at his age, Aciman is effusive. “Always, always, always. You cannot plan desire, it has to come on its own. I love the fact that desire always comes unannounced.”

• The Gentleman From Peru ($29.40), published by Faber & Faber, is available from Amazon SG ( amzn.to/4d60XRl ).

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