Find Me
André Aciman
Faber & Faber
260 pages
5/5
Wow, Find Me has some very mixed reviews on Goodreads. Personally, I loved it.
Summary: 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.
Stats
Total Reading Time: 2h 30
Reading Speed p/h: 103.8
Most Pages Read in a Day: 260
Most Minutes Read in a Day: 150
Find Me is a book that you are either going to love or feel very disappointed by. This will all depend on your expectations going into it. If you loved Call Me By Your Name and want more of the same or think that this book is going to go a certain way then it will not live up to your expectations. I am very glad I did read some reviews before reading it because they did change my expectations and I found myself absolutely loving it.
Find Me is just as beautifully written as Call Me By Your Name. Aciman is very good at evoking emotion and a sense of longing from his characters and I just love to get lost in his prose.
The book is split into four parts. Part one, Tempo follows Elio’s father, Samuel, as he embarks on a passionate encounter with a woman he meets on a train whilst travelling to meet his son. It’s the longest part and probably my least favourite although it isn’t bad. Miranda, the woman he meets, comes across as a little bit too much of a Manic Pixie Dream Girl but the story itself was interesting and it starts the theme of not truly living that threads its way through the rest of the book.
Part two, Cadenza, switches back to Elio and explores his relationship with a man twice his age and, oh my, is it beautiful to read. Part three, Capriccio, turns to Oliver as he begins to re-evaluate his life and makes a huge decision about his future and part four, Da Capo, follows on from that and lets just say that I absolutely loved it.
The themes in Find Me are beautifully explored, especially the feelings of loneliness and the feeling of a life not lived. Samuel, Elio and Oliver all come across as people who have stopped living and are merely existing in the lives they have found themselves in. It is remarkably bittersweet but the romances help bring them back to life which was just utterly beautiful to read.
Find Me is not going to be a book for everyone. You do have to alter your expectations going into it because it will not live up to them. I know what the readers want, because I want that too, and when you get it, it is only eleven pages long but they are a glorious eleven pages. I personally loved Find Me. It is beautifully written with the same wistful bitter sweetness of Call Me By Your Name and it made me so happy to read it.
THE HOBBLEIT 