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André Aciman’s Call Me By Your Name is known mostly for its 2017 film adaptation directed by Luca Guadagnino, however, before the release of the smash art-house hit, fans of Aciman’s original novel were relatively few, only funding enough book sales to keep Aciman an employed novelist. But recently, fans of Aciman’s original 2007 text were joined in their hundreds by new company following the release of the film starring Timothe Chalamet in his breakout role. Last year the sequel, Find Me, sent fans of the movie and the novel into a frenzy when it was announced the story of Elio and Oliver would continue. It would be the first novel published by the author since 2007 and is set nearly two decades after the first novel.

 

Find Me is frustrating. The novel is written in three parts, each told from the first person perspective of three characters Aciman created in Call Me By Your Name: Samuel, an older university professor existentially obsessed with art and archeology, his son and musician, Elio, and Elio’s lover and grad-student, Oliver. The first section closely follows Samuel and the frisson between himself and a “beautiful young woman” half is age, called Miranda as they meet romantically on a train travelling to Florence. It describes the following, spontaneous few days in which the two abandon their previous plans in the city and spend it together, jumping from their bed to cafes and back to their bed again. The first part promises so much and delivers nothing. With constant, unyielding talk from the narrator of the love he feels for Miranda, Aciman gives the relationship no ending at all before brutally transitioning to his next perspective, Elio’s. The first section reads like a painfully long staging of a beautiful, elaborate set which, when it seems as though the play is finally about to begin, the audience are turned away and told to go home, absolutely unsatisfied and confused.

 

When the novel turns to its second part, Aciman pulls the reader in again. It charts the painfully contrived meeting of Elio with a fellow musician. It is incredibly short, numbering 80 pages and largely features scenes which are highly sexual, and of no specified literary value, character evolution or narrative purpose. Instead, it continues the same shooting pace of the lovers collapsing into each other’s lives until the section ends suddenly, with no notice. The novel then changes perspective to follow Oliver. The section reads like a spark between two people which starts like fireworks, shooting them up to disappear into the sky with none of the expected bright, colourful expression. The repetition of the first part’s trick leaves the reader feeling frustrated, exhausted and looking for return on all of the investment they’ve dispensed into the novel. 

 

You do not see Oliver — the advertised co-star of the novel — until the third and last section which spans a mere 30 pages of the text. At this, his reunion with Elio, which is built by the author to be phenomenal and dramatic, is disarming in its reality, which is anti-climactic. They also meet no conclusion and the novel ends, perhaps ironically, or at best, fittingly, during an incomplete conversation. 

 

There is one thing genuinely charming about the novel Aciman delivers. There are continuous verbal expressions of love, the same inexpressible feeling attempted again and again to be expressed yet, touchingly, each attempt is unqualified to do the feeling justice — and in that way this novel perhaps may be called stirring. Though largely, Aciman fails to do something quite essential in a romance novel; which is to build an actual convincing romance in his three relationships and the generous 200+ pages that the novel takes up. Not one of the three relationships that Aciman describes make sense to the people around them or, more worryingly, to the reader. This is a frustrating limitation of Find Me and one the writer seems wholly ignorant to. 

 

He breaks the first rule of writing, the classic that is: show, don’t tell. Through the novel, the reader is told the characters are in love, told the characters are talented, told the characters are intelligent and, most embarrassingly, told they are interesting people. They are proven to be little else than one-dimensional and pretentious, expressing no functional psychology. They are just bots to drop lines of convoluted humour and make judgements of their companions which are unconvincingly accepted as accurate.

 

The novel is full of long, very long, scenes of meandering conversation. Conversations which are filled with searching questions and coy replies transcribed to the reader at such frequence and exhausting ceremony that they transgress past normal to something more regretful: benal. Aciman shows life not keenly observed or well rendered in any sense. The writing is boring and not particularly skillful, with no delicate or energising movement other than painful meandering which retires unsatisfactorily only to start up with another character, in another love. The novel is, in one way, poetic; only concerned with the exhilarating start of a relationship without the emotional conviction to continue it past lust and so perhaps, by that, it is arguably the ‘modern’ love story its publisher pitches it to be.