When André Aciman announced he was penning a sequel to his 2007 novel, Call Me By Your Name, which was the basis for an Academy Award-winning film, fans were understandably excited to read the continuation of the sultry romance between Elio and Oliver. But their relationship is relegated to a footnote in Find Me, which instead is primarily a self-insertion fantasy where the 68-year-old author has written two stories about men around his age having lots of sex with much younger people.
Almost half of the book is devoted to Elio’s father, Samuel, who in Call Me By Your Name confessed that he never had the sort of rare love his son found when he struck up a relationship with an academic staying at the family’s summer home in Italy. The now-divorced Samuel gets his chance in Find Me with Miranda, a beautiful woman half his age who he meets on a train to Rome.
“Why so glum?” are the first three words of the book, spoken by Samuel to Miranda. Rather than reacting negatively to this version of “You should smile more,” Miranda starts up a conversation with Samuel about their respective bad luck in love and the works of Dostoevsky.
Call Me By Your Name is filled with similar philosophical and academic monologues, which were mostly excised in the film adaptation or abbreviated into a few character-building scenes. The written ones worked much better in Call Me By Your Name, where the characters were all academics, artists, or precocious teenagers. Here it’s meant to represent a sort of fated, fairy tale meeting of the minds.
It just so happens that Miranda’s father is also a Jewish professor, like Samuel’s. And as they talk, Samuel realizes she’s even hotter than he first thought. When Miranda invites the stranger she’s made a newfound connection with to her dying father’s birthday celebration, Samuel spends the whole affair fantasizing about her in florid prose: “She was beautiful and unreachable, and once again I held myself back from putting my arm around her and letting my lips touch her cheek, her neck, the back of her ear. Could she tell that wanting to hold her both stirred and dismayed me, because I knew there was no room for me in her world.”
But it turns out, there is. Miranda is a classic Manic Pixie Dream Girl, a photographer who takes Samuel around Rome and snaps pictures of him as he regales her with tales of how happy he was when he worked in the city and slept with his students. After less than 24 hours together, they’re having sex, declaring their eternal love, and considering getting tattoos of pictoral representations of each others’ genitals (a lighthouse for his penis, a fig for her vagina). Samuel tells Miranda she’s given him the courage to do things he’s always wanted to do like shave his head, buy a leather jacket, and get his ear pierced. The whole thing would seem like parody if Aciman showed even a bit of self-awareness. As a kicker, Miranda’s whole purpose seems to be to produce a baby for Elio and Oliver to decide is theirs even though she’s still alive.
Elio quickly accepts his father’s new relationship, and winds up in a May-December romance of his own with Michel, a wealthy lawyer he also meets through kismet. Their relationship is an interlude in both the book and Elio’s life, meant to put him on somewhat equal footing with Oliver’s own romantic experience when the two finally reconcile. But the author has no idea what to do with the characters. There are some sex scenes and the sort of elaborate meals that made Call Me By Your Name a sensual pleasure on both the page and screen, but Aciman also has Michel and Elio trying to unravel a historical mystery that doesn’t really go anywhere.
Oliver gets his own brief narrating section, meant to fill in the gaps between the meetings with Elio found at the end of the novel Call Me By Your Name, which continues after the movie’s credits roll. His revelation that he’s never been happier than he was with Elio comes after an attempt to set up a threesome at a party doesn’t work out. The result is that his reconciliation with Elio feels less like the result of 20 years of soul searching and more like receiving a Facebook message from a high school fling who recently set his relationship status to “single.”
What’s infuriating is that when Elio and Oliver finally do come together, Find Me manages to recapture the magic of Call Me By Your Name. There’s a beautiful fragility to the pair’s rekindled romance as they navigate the challenges of wanting to relive their past while building a future. Their emotional and sexual anxieties feel honest and relatable in a way that nothing else in the novel does.
In Call Me By Your Name, Elio laments that he wasted so much time with Oliver because he didn’t realize that his feelings were reciprocated. In Find Me, it’s Aciman who wastes his readers’ time by delivering a lengthy preamble that has nothing to do with what made his original novel great. The film adaptation of Call Me By Your Name is a landmark queer coming-of-age romance, but an adaption of Find Me would just feel like a late-career Woody Allen flick. Maybe someone can stretch the novel’s final chapter into a properly satisfying follow-up, but until then Find Me is a terrible disappointment.
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As I was reading the description of Oliver’s plotline, I kept thinking that this can’t be for real as it legitimately came across as wish-fulfillment parody rather than something serious. It’s also very different than what I expected from the headline as I feel the common danger of writing these kinds of sequels is that they start to mythologize and fundamentally change who the characters once were. Did not see ‘Elio’s dad desperately needs a boost from a much younger woman’ kind of a story coming on.
It’s getting much better reviews in both the Guardian and the NYT, so I wouldn’t write the book off out of hand. I feel like the true ‘fanfic’ route would have been to dive right back into reproducing peoples’ fantasies for E&O.
It really seems like the internet is terrible for sequels. It seems like a lot of books respond to internet comments rather than forging their new path or trying to make something interesting.
I don’t think it is the internet as it was basically the same before it. I mean there was no internet forcing Thomas Harris to transform Hannibal Lecter in to whatever Hannibal was.
True.
I think it’s more that some sequels come from the authors desire to further the story and some are because the author had a hit and doesn’t know how to/fears branching out to write something else.
Were there a lot of Internet comments asking for Elio’s father to get some ass?
Well, I’m not surprised. CMBYN was filled with the kind of florid prose mentioned above. The relationship between Elio and Oliver never really came to life for me, either. It felt like fantasy. Although I did think Aciman did a good job describing what it’s like to be young and attracted to someone who is giving you mixed signals. Honestly, I’m not sure why people loved that book so much.
As a former student from a literary criticism course taught by André Aciman a few years ago: yeah, somehow none of this surprises me.
Ooooooh, what’s he like as a professor?
It was definitely weird. The course itself was a great idea: the art of writing/analyzing book reviews. Each weekly class had a different guest lecturer, usually a literary critic like Rachel Saltz or a novelist like Colm Tóibín. This meant that André Aciman didn’t really do anything except sit back and occasionally interrupt with a brief remark or an anecdote.But the memorable part has to do with the fact that I registered a few days late, which Aciman initially told me was fine… but as the semester progressed, there was a bizarre trend of my never getting my papers back when the rest of the class did, even though I always handed my assignments in on time. This kept happening every few weeks. I would always have to approach Aciman at the end of class, hear some version of “who are you again?” and hope that he would read and grade my paper by the next time the class met. (He barely left any comments anyway.) I don’t know if he had a grudge against me for registering late, or he simply forgot I existed because I was apparently the only person in the class who wasn’t working toward a master’s in English, but it was an extremely odd experience.
I just abandoned Call Me By Your Name at about the 100-page mark because I couldn’t take any more of its screed-of-a-horned-up-Lost-Boy vibe. Is he as arrogant and self-indulgent and horny as his writing has led me to believe?
Seems like one of those sequels that tarnishes everything about the original and diminishes the “classic” status of the first one. Unrelated, I am watching Halloween 5 right now.
The film adaptation of Call Me By Your Name is a landmark queer coming-of-age romanceUh, no it’s not. I’ve seldom be so annoyed by a movie, gay-themed or not. Hammer’s acting was praised, and after viewing the film I realized it was really for not sucking balls.The story itself felt more like a gay Hallmark movie than anything I’d wish on queer teens trying to make sense of the world. And the characters are so removed from anything that actual life is about I still fume at being sucked into watching this tripe.
Did you not like the part where Hammer was like “ARMIE HAMMER, SMASH!” and he’d rip stuff apart?
Can’t say I have. But my brain has blocked every appearance of Mr Hammer ever seen on the screen, so that may explain why 🙂
A bit off topic, but anyone know how to get the videos that are mixed in with all articles these days, to NOT start playing on their own? I mean, I’m as curious as anyone to find out what it was like for Adam Devine to play the “straight man” to a phone, but I’d rather opt in to hearing about that rather than have it forced on me. Help!
I know that on the pc, using Firefox, under options/Content Blocking you can check off ‘block autoplay audio/video’. Also, the Firefox add-on called ‘No Script’ blocks basically *everything*. (But also requires an extra click/reload to see certain sites if they use a ton of Javascript. It doesn’t take that much extra effort but I can see how it would be annoying to some. YMMV.)
Sure wish I knew a way to block it on an iPad, though. 🙁
Thanks!
So we’d all be better off reading Maurice for the 20th time?
A lot of award-winning pieces of literature are fanfic, depending on how broad you make the term. Something that definitely isn’t fanfic: a direct sequel to a book, written by that book’s author, just because it happens to be self-indulgent and awful.
Im an admitted CMBYN mega stan and haven’t read the entire of Find Me, but from what I have read so far, I’d pretty much like to rip out the first chapter and hurl it into a fire, sans tears streaming down my face. Manic Pixie Dream Girl is EXACTLY how Miranda comes across, and I actually sat there reading the whole thing like, is this a joke??? GTFO here with your lighthouse, bruh. If ever there’s a sequel to the film, please don’t let Aciman near the goddamned thing.