Find Me by André Aciman

In Find Me, Aciman shows us Elio's father, Samuel, on a trip from Florence to Rome to visit Elio, now a gifted classical pianist. A chance encounter on the train upends Sami's visit and changes his life forever. Elio soon moves to Paris, where he, too, has a consequential affair, while Oliver, 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 nuances of emotion that are the substance of passion. Find Me brings us back inside the world of one of our greatest contemporary romances to show us that in fact true love never dies.

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.

“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.

It's just that the magic of someone new never lasts long enough. We only want those we can't have. It's those we lost or who never knew we existed who leave their mark. The others barely echo.

This was interesting! Whatever I had expected from a sequel (and I really hadn't expected a lot. Not because I thought it would fail, but because I couldn't think of any way to continue the story of the first book), this was not it!

But I really enjoyed this book! I see it as a story that gives us updates on all the known characters' lives. This book isn't necessary in the sense that it answers any open questions or concludes the story – Call Me by Your Name still works as a stand-alone book. But Find Me does expand the universe Aciman has created (without ruining it) and is a feast for my sappy heart.