i don't really know how to feel about this book, but i kinda want to quote what the irish times said about it: think about find me as call me by your name's coda, the final flourish that ends a great work. personally, i'm not a big fan of novels that are all about love and romance and don't have a deeper meaning within. but since i enjoyed the movie adaption of its prequel a lot, i figured to give this a try. i didn't expect that aciman gave samuel and miranda such a big part of the novel, nearly the half of it, but at the end i wasn't surprised at all. i think both works really embrace the topic of relationships with "big" age differences between the two lovers and seeing this continuously throughout the characters fitted the topic, but, to be honest, kinda unrealistic, that three relationships all resembled this feature. nevertheless, it made me sit through the novel and i guess call me by your name didn't need a sequel, but at least this one fits it, rounds up the end and gave one the vibes of mediterran italy a little while longer.

I don’t even know where to start, because “Call me by your name” is one of my favourite books and “Find me” is one of the worst books I’ve ever read. I’m no fan of sequels to books that work perfectly well as stand-alones, so I don’t even know what I was expecting. Beautiful prose, a story about desire, an atmospheric Italian setting, a slow-burn romance – all the things I loved about cmbyn Well, here’s the Insta-love debacle that is Find Me. Spoilers ahead. 10 years after the events of cmbyn we have to endure Samuel (Elio’s dad) picking up a young woman in her early twenties (textbook stereotype of a manic pixie dream girl, it’s almost like Aciman’s never met a real life woman). It’s so uncomfortable to read since it’s about 120 pages of an old man’s fantasies. He keeps interpreting everything she says or does as her being so very much into him and Aciman does his worst at trying to convince us that Miranda is Samuel’s soulmate. The Samuel in “Find Me” is not the one who had me sobbing in cmbyn. This one’s nothing but a chauvinist having a late mid-life crisis and I spare you the details, but about 12 hours and several sex scenes later they are planning on getting matching tattoos, having a child and a happily ever after. It’s such a badly constructed fantasy that not even Aciman’s prose can save it. Miranda by now has met Elio who’s super supportive of his father’s 5-minutes-old relationship, Samuel has met Miranda’s father and also, Miranda’s treating her dog like shit. Let’s move on to Part 2, 15 years later and Elio’s finally making a proper appearance. He’s a pianist in France and attending a concert at a church when – surprise – an old dude picks him up. Not only does Aciman repeat the whole Insta-love-with-a-person-twice-your-age-thing, he manages to add details to the story that make everything feel even more forced and cringe-worthy: Michel, Elio’s senior lover, finds out that his own dad had a thing with a guy twice his age, who was Jewish, just like Elio (who reminds Michel of his son, by the way, and who “feels like a toddler” when he and Michel have sex for the first time), everything and everyone’s connected because everyone loves the piano and according to Aciman that’s fate. Why this weird obsession with huge age differences? Because there were audiences that criticised the 7 year age gap between Elio and Oliver in Cmbyn? For characters trying to convince us that age doesn’t matter, Samuel, Miranda, Elio & Michel for sure do talk a lot about their respective ages. It’s infuriating. Equally infuriating is that Aciman’s characters keep treating lovers like shit and their cheating is always played down because these people were not “the one” for them (same thing happens in Enigma Variations). But now Part 3, 20 years later. It’s the bit from Oliver’s perspective and is so random. He’s having a farewell party because he and his wife are moving back to wherever they lived before. He invites a woman from his yoga class that he’s into and a guy who works at the same institute that he’s also into. Oliver knows both of them only by sight. Both guests arrive with their partners but the woman, the man and Oliver have a weird understanding that they’re all very much attracted to each other and have some kind of telepathic threesome at the party. Until the man plays a piano piece that Elio used to play and now Oliver decides it’s finally time to leave his wife and children and reunite with Elio. Have I already mentioned that all the characters are super pretentious and constantly talk in an overtly-intellectualised way? Part 4. I thought I finally had endured most of it when, at the end, Elio and Oliver live in the family’s house in Italy, with Elio’s mother, who now has dementia, and with Miranda & her & Samuel’s son who is called Oliver, after Oliver and that little Oliver is basically big Oliver and Elio’s son. I mean. I don’t even know what to say. The whole book pretends to have depth but it’s so incredibly superficial and reduces its characters, the ones I came to love in cmbyn, to mere stock figures, buried in a terribly constructed, confusing and cringe-worthy narrative. Do yourself a favour and don’t read it.