In Find Me, the Sequel to Call Me by Your Name, the Echoes of Love Are Resounding

The Ancient Greek verb opsizo, as the reader is told in Find Me, André Aciman’s sequel to his 2007 novel Call Me By Your Name, is a way to name the act of arriving too late to the feast, “or to feast today with the weight of all the wasted yesteryears.” Call Me By Your Name tells the story of a brief yet fervent summer romance between two young men, Elio and Oliver, at Elio’s family’s Italian villa. Samuel, Elio’s father, now divorced in Find Me many years after the events of the earlier novel and traveling by train from Florence to Rome to read from his most recent book at a university, explains the meaning of opsizo to Miranda, a young and beautiful American woman he meets on the train. An intense mutual sexual attraction quickly develops between them, and what follows is an improbable yet captivatingly believable romance between the older man and much younger woman. Perhaps Samuel has in fact arrived at the feast just in time, laden with empty years but not yet bereft of the possibility of real, lasting love.

The echoes of a conversation between Samuel and Elio in Call Me By Your Name, when the father advised the son about how to value even the loss of love as evidence of a life fully lived, are immediately apparent in Samuel’s approach to his unexpected courtship with Miranda in Find Me. “We only want those we can’t have,” he says to her, referring to his habit of revisiting a particular location in Rome that always reminds him of another lost love that he doesn’t share with the reader. “It’s those we lost or who never knew we existed who leave their mark. The others barely echo.” And Find Me is essentially a novel of echoes. Each of its disparate sections, narrated first by Samuel, then by Elio, and then by Oliver before Elio eventually gets the final word, interrogate the ways in which the past—whether in the form of lived experiences or in imagined detours—is where we are our truest, most yearning selves. The echoes are sometimes more beautiful than the sounds that they reflect.

The danger, of course, lies in the possibility of succumbing to opsizo, failing to capitalize on possibilities existing in the present. Just before kissing Samuel for the first time, Miranda accuses him of not being a present-tense kind of person. “This, for instance, is the present tense,” she says before her tongue first grazes his lips, and the section of Find Me that comprises Samuel and Miranda’s first day together takes up more than a third of the novel, an intensely present-tense sequence that challenges us to value a narrative almost entirely devoid of conflict, built instead on gentle surprise and the visceral pleasure of witnessing the origins of an unlikely love affair between two complex and very forthcoming characters.

And Find Me’s subsequent section, told from Elio’s point of view, cleverly reverses the age dynamic between narrator and object of affection as Elio, a decade after Oliver, unexpectedly falls in love with a much older man—a man his father’s age, in fact. “I’d lost my soul for so long and was now finding I’d owned it all along but didn’t know where to look for it or how to find it without him,” Elio tells us, a sensation also described by Samuel when he says to Miranda that everything in his life before “was all leading up to you.”

Oliver, too, in the decades since his affair with Elio, has abandoned a significant part of himself to the past, specifically to events that took place at a certain Italian villa. Now a relatively happily married professor with two grown sons, he still entertains possibilities for a more uncontainable desire, in the form of flirtations with colleagues and yoga classmates, even as he believes that his chance for true happiness was lost when he turned his back on Elio all those years ago. When a guest at a party he’s throwing in his Manhattan apartment plays a piano piece that Elio once played for him, Oliver realizes that “some arcane and beguiling wording was being spoken about what my life had been, and might still be, or might never be, and that the choice rested on the keyboard itself, and I hadn’t been told.”

In her 1997 collection of essays, The End of the Novel of Love, memorist and critic Vivian Gornick argues that somewhere in the middle of the 20th century, as a result of a cultural turning away from the traditional social order with regards to gender, the subject of romantic love—once a wellspring for narrative—had lost its potential for depth and complexity, its reliable knack for drama. She writes that the “idea of love as a means of illumination—in literature as in life—now comes as something of an anticlimax.” But in Find Me, the anticlimax is the point. Aciman dispenses with the notion of love as fuel for narrative and instead uses its power of transfiguration as the measure by which to evaluate a life.

For all its straightforward narration, Find Me has layers of complexity that come through as echoes between its sections, dialogue repeated in slightly different cadences by characters as they circle around issues of time and fate, life and death. The novel’s beating heart is the fact of mortality and the tragedy of aging, which is staged in stark relief by the age discrepancy between the members of the novel’s first two romantic pairings. This theme is made literal by Samuel’s death after he has a child and lives several happy years with Miranda, and the threads of fate and chance woven throughout Find Me—the title itself a call to action—all amount to the fear of dying before we ever truly get to live. “I think all lives are condemned to remain unfinished,” Elio’s older lover says to him, perhaps already recognizing how their affair will end. “This is the deplorable truth we all live with. We reach the end and are by no means done with life, not by a long stretch! There are projects we barely started, matters so unresolved and left hanging everywhere. Living means dying with regrets stuck in your craw.”

Later, Oliver recalls a moment on the street when he met the gaze of someone from his department at the university who should have recognized him but who failed to acknowledge him at all. And he explains that he believed for a moment that he had died—“that this was what death was like: you see people but they don’t see you, and worse yet, you’re trapped being who you were in the moment you died … and you never changed into the person you could have been and knew you really were, and you never redressed the one mistake that threw your life off course.” Find Me is a series of ghost stories interrupted by fleeting flashes of light, just like the lives of the characters described in its pages who find and lose and find again their great loves. But it’s the possibility of light that we all live for, as these characters remind us. The chance for someone to dim everything that has come before into shadow.

And, sometimes, a second chance.

André Aciman’s Find Me is available on October 29 from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.