Their love seemed so pure and I had a tremendous desire to see them end up living happily ever after. In the middle of the book, I would have given anything for Elio and Oliver to unite in holy matrimony. I remember reading Call Me By Your Name for the first time. Even Little Ollie - who was, of course, named after Oliver - is claimed as their son. Perlman, unfortunately, has died.)Īciman doesn’t provide much context for the complexities of this new arrangement, and thus, it comes across as an overly neat conclusion. That house is also occupied by Elio’s aging mother, her caregiver, and Elio’s father’s youngest son (with the woman from the train), “Little Ollie.” (Mr. In the final part (called “Da Capo,” an Italian musical term that translates to “repeat from the beginning,”) Elio and Oliver now miraculously live together in Italy several decades after separating, in the same house where it all began.
Yet this sense of unknowing is undone when Aciman commits Find Me’s biggest crime: actually reuniting Elio and Oliver at the end. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the strongest parts of both Elio and Oliver’s stories are the moments in which they recall each other, wondering what their lives could have been if they had pursued a life together rather than going their separate ways. Elio’s chapter is the strongest of these first three, charting his relationship with a much older man that he meets at a chamber music concert. In Oliver’s part, the once-headstrong academic is presented as bumbling, somewhat creepily inviting two of his crushes (one man, one woman) to his going-away party, where his wife is also present. Perlman’s chance meeting with a much younger woman on a subway car, in which he intrusively asks her, “Why so glum?” Instead of being turned off, she eventually invites him to her dad’s house for a meal and they end up settling down together.
But while the central romance in Call Me By Your Name is gradually built up over the course of a couple hundred pages, the quasi-short story format of Find Me makes these narratives seem rushed, in a way that is almost prurient.įind Me begins with Mr. Aciman is still primarily interested in the unpredictability of love.
Each takes place in a different time period and tells an individual story about that given character. Perlman, then Elio himself, then from Oliver, and finally Elio again. Unlike Call Me By Your Name, which is told entirely from Elio’s perspective, Find Me, which is split into four parts, is told from the perspective of three different characters: first from Mr.
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