Find Me

I'm so disappointed. This was just... not good and not needed. If you were hoping for more Elio and Oliver, you'll be sorely disappointed to find out that their paths don't even cross again until about 90% of the way into this book.

The first half is focused on Elio's father, Samuel, ten years after Oliver's summer in Italy. Now divorced from Elio's mother, Samuel meets a woman half his age on a train, and they fall in love instantly. I ended up skimming through a lot of this as I just couldn't make myself care. I didn't come here for Samuel's story, I came for more Elio and Oliver.

The next section is devoted to Elio and his meeting with a man twice his age (not sure what was up with the huge age gaps in this book) and their subsequent love affair. There are moments where Elio's pain over his lost love shines through and those are what kept me reading because to be honest, I didn't care about this new relationship either.

Next comes a brief section devoted to Oliver. It's approximately twenty years later and at a party in his honor, a friend plays a piece on the piano that immediately transports him back to that Italian summer so many years ago when Elio played that same piece for him. It is clear that Oliver hasn't been the same since that summer and he wonders if he should make a trip back to Italy.

This final section is where I was hoping the story would make up for all the crap that took up the first 85% of the book but sadly it didn't. The reunion between Elio and Oliver is incredibly rushed, on one page Oliver is thinking about going to Italy, and the next they're literally weeks into their visit. The intensity that was originally there between Elio and Oliver in Call Me By Your Name is severely lacking. What should be a satisfying end to their story, isn't. I wish I hadn't even bothered with this.

What a strange little book. The whole time I was reading it, I couldn't help but feel that it was semi-rushed out to capitalize on the success of the Call Me By Your Name movie. I bet he had these vignettes floating around in his head for a while, and being able to write short stories that only thematically connected probably helped him get the thing done more quickly than if he had to write a full novel.

I liked it, but didn't love it. That Aciman technique of minutely dissecting every tiny shade of physical touch, facial expression, glance, word, tone, feels fresh and honest and beautiful when the book opens, but it started to grate on me and become annoying by the middle. For much of the book, the writing is sublime, but there are moments where he gets too abstract, or oppositely, too detailed, which pulls you out. He's at his best when the writing lands as he no doubt wants it to - universal, relatable, expressing meaning that you didn't even realize was contained in human interactions.

I wasn't quite sure what to do with the titles of each section of the book - although I will admit that the middle section, Cadenza, felt structured like a musical cadenza. Hitting various themes of Elio's life, climaxing to the final trill - then leaving off in the middle, not really an ending, letting you wonder what happened to Elio and Michel.

I rejected the ending - the idea that Elio and Oliver somehow end up happy together long in the future is both heartbreaking and wildly unrealistic. When I saw Aciman speak, he said he found it difficult to peer inside Oliver's head, it's a character he doesn't identify with - and this came across in the book. The Oliver section is the most opaque, it's difficult to really wrap yourself around that character.

I'm glad I read this, but I don't think it's a must-read by any means, like Call Me By Your Name.

“Find Me” est la suite - tant attendue par beaucoup, moi y compris - du très beau roman “Call me by your name” d'André Aciman, publié en 2007 et porté à l'écran en 2017.

“Call me by your name” racontait l'histoire d'amour, le temps d'un été, entre Elio, un adolescent de 17 ans, et Oliver, un étudiant américain de 24 ans. Dans la maison familiale d'Elio et ses parents en Italie, le jeune garçon et son aîné découvraient l'amour des hommes, jusqu'à l'heure du départ d'Oliver, laissant Elio dévasté par la perte de son premier amour.

“Find Me” se déroule des années plus tard et se compose de quatre parties de taille inégale :

- La première partie, la plus longue me semble-t-il, raconte la rencontre entre Samuel, le père d'Elio, et une jeune femme, Miranda, dans le train qui les emmène à Rome.

- La deuxième partie se déroule à Paris et relate l'aventure entre Elio, désormais pianiste professionnel, et Michel, un avocat rencontré lors d'un concert de musique classique

- La troisième partie a lieu à New York où Oliver fête son retour dans le New Hampshire après un semestre passé dans une université new-yorkaise

- La quatrième et dernière partie, la plus courte, se déroule après les retrouvailles entre Elio et Oliver, nous permettant de découvrir la suite (et fin ?) de leur histoire

Je dois dire que ce livre m'a d'abord enchanté, avant de me décevoir quelque peu. Dès les premières pages, et pendant presque toute la première partie, j'ai retrouvé le talent d'André Aciman pour parler des sentiments, avec une sensibilité que j'ai envie de comparer à celle de Stefan Zweig.

Malheureusement, la suite m'a semblé plus fade, un peu répétitive, et je me suis presque ennuyé par moment. Du coup, même les retrouvailles tant attendues entre Elio et Oliver ne m'ont pas emballé autant que je l'aurais cru, et j'ai terminé le roman avec un sentiment d'inachevé, ou d'être moi-même passé à côté de quelque chose.

Pour un roman parlant du temps qui passe, j'ai eu du mal à saisir quand se déroulaient les chapitres les uns par rapport aux autres, si des semaines, des mois ou des années les séparaient.

André Aciman écrit très bien sur le temps qui passe, sur les liens qui unissent ses personnages, mais son récit manque ici d'ampleur et de ligne directrice.

J'ai donc été déçu par cette “suite” du très beau roman qui nous avait permis de faire la connaissance d'Elio et Oliver. Finalement, ce qui m'a le plus plu dans ce récit, c'est la partie consacré au père d'Elio : déjà sympathique dans “Call me by your name”, Samuel se révèle ici un personnage profond et dont il est plaisant de suivre les pensées. Dommage que le reste ne soit pas à la hauteur.