Levels of boredom have climaxed across the board during this first week of quarantine. I could give you some pointers about how to fill your time, but instead I’m going to tell you what absolutely NOT to do: do not read Find Me, the tragically disappointing sequel to Call Me By Your Name. 

It gives me no joy to say this. Fan clubs are known to joke that all “stans” of the original novel are, by default, either gay or depressed. I, being neither, can just appreciate a work of art when I see one. And that’s what Call Me By Your Name is: a masterpiece. Its raw, honest illustration of adolescent love and lust managed to captivate the hearts of an entire generation like no other book. The 2007 publication of the novel sparked a widespread, cult-like obsession that peaked with the release of the movie adaptation in 2017 at the SunDance film festival, finally cementing its unchallenged presence in pop culture. 

The Call Me By Your Name fan base is incredibly active, not to mention enormous. The tragic ending left some of us feeling just as heartbroken as Elio, robbed of the future that he and Oliver seemed destined to have. This created a hunger for a second book. But, the tragic ending was necessary to the integrity of Call Me By Your Name; it was about first love, not true love. A good sequel deepens the meaning of the original. To me, Find Me seems like André Aciman’s follow-up attempt to appease his fans and not a genuinely written continuation of his original masterpiece (forgive me, André, I love you). 

Find Me opens up its first section, called “Tempo”, and a fast-paced one at that, with a perspective switch to a first person account of Elio’s deeply empathetic and intuitive father, Samuel. By the end of the first novel, he reveals to his son that he never experienced real love, not even during his marriage to Elio’s mother. Now divorced and alone, he meets a young (over a decade younger than he) Miranda on a train to Rome. Their spontaneous connection erupts out of innocent small talk, stimulated by probing questions and philosophical conversation, and into professing their love for one another all within a 24 hour period. Her flippant attitude with past loves compliments his discouragingly unpassionate history, making it easy for them to seize the day and not let anything slip away. Within the week, they decide to spend the rest of their lives together and immediately have a child. Carpe diem, I guess? 

These characters, their romance, just feels so forced. None of it can be real. Their all too casual deep dives into philosophical theory do not represent normal human conversation, but rather the author’s opportunity to throw around his own ideas, breaking the age-old rule of “show don’t tell”. What used to be raw, tangible emotion in elegant prose now feels like a bad script ripped right out of the hands of a cheesy rom-com, or at times, even pornography. The sex writing in CMBYN was meaningful and served a grander purpose; Find Me’s seem like Aciman projecting his own sexual fantasies onto paper. What used to be carefully crafted characters and relationships turned into outwardly deep outlines of people and interpersonal developments that are really just shallow. 

Their whirlwind romance prompts the theme that prevails throughout the rest of the novel: a cycle of older selves reflecting and acting upon a desire to recapture their youth. 

Five years later, Elio seizes control of the narrative in the second act called “Cadenza”. Musically speaking, cadenzas denote a solo passage of virtuosic skill in a “free” rhythmic style, emblematic of Elio’s detached performance of love while with a new man, Michel, and their romance that is contrastingly more quaint than the tornado that is his father’s and Miranda’s. Now an accomplished pianist in Paris, he meets Michel (double Elio’s age) who falls in love with Elio instantly. This section centers around a mysterious piece of music Michel’s father posthumously left for him. They discover that the Jewish Kaddish is subliminally written within the notes, inserted by a man sent to a concentration camp during WWII that left this to Michel’s father as a token of his identity and symbol of their love affair. This is where Aciman hammers home the point that the only constant in life is change; people grow into and moult out of countless skins, each identity gone unknown even to those closest to them. “I suspect we have first selves and second selves and perhaps third, fourth, and fifth selves and many more in between” Aciman communicates through Michel. 

Let’s take a step back, please. The connection to Judaism is seamless in CMBYN; Elio’s struggle with his religious identity is confronted when he discovers Oliver wearing a Star of David necklace so openly. Elio’s “mother says we are Jews of discretion”, but through Oliver he can access that part of himself more positively. In Find Me, it seems so… random. It seems so… criminally irrelevant. So fabricated. So shoved in there. Again, with the authenticity. If it’s just me that’s missing something here, enlighten me. But thanks anyway, André, fellow brother, from the bottom of my heart for the shoutout to the Jewish community. Means a lot. 

Michel loves Elio the way Elio still loves Oliver, so he ends their relationship and flies to America in hopes of reuniting with Oliver. 

The lens is readjusted yet again in the third and shortest section “Capriccio”, narrated through Oliver. Unhappily married, he explores his attraction to both a male and female guest at the moving-away party he throws for himself. Because he so long ago chose to reject Elio and with Elio his true self, he hasn’t made a genuine connection with anyone since. A colleague performs a song on the piano that he instantly recognizes to be the same capriccio Elio played for him 20 years ago, somewhere in northern Italy, 1983. Memories come flooding back and he realizes he must end this version of himself and go home to Elio. 

It is Oliver’s storyline that holds the most weight in all of the novel. He seems to be the single character capable of having multiple layers of emotion, who does not always know exactly what or how he feels in any given moment, and does not speak in unrealistically precise philosophical paragraphs. He prompts deeper analysis.

Titled “Da Capo”, the final section of Find Me takes on the literal meaning of the Italian translation of the musical term: from the beginning. Aciman’s repeated motif of the cyclical pattern of life is proven true; after much accumulated suspense, Elio and Oliver find eachother once again. Elio rightfully regains control of the narrative, now living in the same villa from CMBYN following the death of his father. Miranda lives with him, too, along with the child Samuel fathered. The child’s name: Oliver. 

Yes; yes, Elio’s father named his new son, Elio’s half-brother, Oliver, after the man who prompted his other son’s, Elio’s, sexual awakening, who was his first and most epic love. Elio now had an older lover and younger brother named Oliver. Yes, that happened. And, because the child Oliver has to grow up fatherless, Elio and his LOVER Oliver, vow to take care of him as a symbol of their never ending love. 

It’s all too easy; and too weird! Need I go on?

What I did enjoy about this section was the contrast between the pair’s narration as compared to CMBYN. The pages no longer almost burst with an all-consuming passion, but read a certain rhythm of tenderness that fit the gentler tone of Find Me. Their years spent in separation had a definite presence between the two, but came crashing down as they synced up and seized hold of the bond they shared once again.

“Time,” says Oliver, and Elio understands “that what he’d meant was that too much time had gone by.” But, he also sees that “despite two decades we were not a day older than the two young men we’d been so long ago.”

The themes expressed in Find Me are absolutely beautiful; it is the way that the concepts are so shallowly made known that ruins their sentiment. The importance of the age difference between Aciman’s character’s is clear; each pair of partners could fit an entire lifetime within the gap. The notion of meeting the right person at the wrong stage of life, either because they were not born yet or were out of sync, is romantic and emblematic of the book’s cyclical portrayal of life. But where in CMBYN, Elio and Oliver were fully formed characters with vivacious and contrasting points of view, Samuel and Miranda only exist as perfect reflections of each other in old versus young bodies. There is no conflict, and therefore no discovery of character, emotion, or invokement of excitement or passion.The novel wants to be intimate and profound, but any emotion falls dead immediately after its expression; the characters are so flatly constructed, they barely qualify as outlines. 

There is a chance that Find Me will get its own movie adaptation. Honestly, even after all I said, I wouldn’t be totally against a sequel to the movie for the sole purpose of seeing Timothée Chalamet and Armie Hammer on the same screen, at the same time again. Because, come on. Nevertheless, I beg you, leave it alone!