94 Time November 4, 2019
A
ndré AcimAn wAsn’T enTirely honesT
with us. In late 2017, around the release of the
film adaptation of his cherished 2007 novel
Call Me by Your Name, he indicated that he’d
closed the book on his characters Elio and Oliver, the star-
crossed lovers at the center of the story. “I’ve said what I
had to say,” he told a reporter, when asked about a poten-
tial sequel. But Aciman had been working on a follow-up
for over a year.
Now, as he prepares for the Oct. 29 release of Find Me,
his new book set in the world of Call Me by Your Name,
Aciman settles in his New York City apartment to come
clean. “I wasn’t sure,” he says. “And I didn’t want to use
the word, which became poisonous, sequel.”
It’s easy to see why Aciman might be wary of the
pressure that comes with a sequel. Though his novel
was acclaimed upon its release, garnering him a Lambda
Literary Award for Gay Fiction, the movie, directed by
Italian filmmaker Luca Guadagnino, turned his story
into a phenomenon. Ten years after the book’s initial
release, it finally landed on the best-seller list, and
Aciman’s publisher says 800,000 copies have now been
sold in the U.S. and Canada. Such a definitive account
was Guadagnino’s film that when Aciman thinks of
Elio and Oliver, he sees actors Timothée Chalamet
and Armie Hammer. He says he tried to put their faces
out of his head when writing Find Me, not wanting to
be influenced by Guadagnino’s storytelling, and was
able to do so because so much time has passed in Elio
and Oliver’s world.
But readers hoping purely for another Elio and Oliver
story may be disappointed. Aciman points out that Find
Me, his fifth novel overall, is not an “obvious sequel” to
Call Me by Your Name because it focuses significantly on
a secondary character from the original book. More than
100 pages pass in Find Me before Elio appears in the flesh,
and it takes Oliver considerably longer. The author tried
for years to jump back into their lives in a more direct
way. “I started with Elio—now he’s 21 or 22 years old and
he’s in his third year of college, blah blah blah,” Aciman
remembers. “I said, ‘This is too stupid. It’s not working.’ I
figured I’d better give up.”
Then, in 2016, he met a woman on a train. She asked
him to mind her dog while she used the bathroom, and
he found her compelling enough to write a scene around.
Within three pages of starting, Aciman realized he had
shifted focus from the dog owner to Elio’s father Samuel
and commenced official re-entry into this verdant world.
Find Me begins with that scene, of the now single
Samuel describing an encounter on a train with a woman
about half his age, named Miranda. He’s on his way to
visit Elio, now an accomplished pianist, in Rome. Ten
years have passed since the magical summer when
17-year-old Elio and 24-year-old Oliver
fell in love, and although life has taken
them apart, they are still on each other’s
minds. Where the first novel features a
breathless internal monologue of rap-
ture and anxiety, Find Me is more con-
cerned with lovestruck conversations
between burgeoning couples. The real
woman got off Aciman’s train after a few
stops. Miranda stays on.in person, Aciman speaks like the
dialogue in Find Me, rhythmic and
philosophizing. We sit in the living
room of the apartment he shares with
his wife of nearly 32 years, where they
raised their three sons. As we face each
other on identical beige couches, he
barely pauses after questions before
delivering long, eloquent answers
in his unplaceable accent. (Aciman
spent his childhood speaking French
in Alexandria, Egypt.) Soon he grows
passionate, waving his arms. When he’s
emphasizing, his eyebrows arch into
crescents as if shielding his face from a
torrent of thoughts.
Growing up, Aciman developed
the worldly existence he would come
to show through his characters, mov-
ing from Egypt to Italy to France to the
U.S., all by the time he was 17. When he
was 14, his Jewish family was kicked out
of largely Muslim Alexandria after their
business was nationalized and their as-
sets were seized. They were left with
nothing as refugees and spent three
years in Rome before finding their way
to New York to rebuild in 1968.
Aciman studied as an undergrad at
New York’s Lehman College, then dab-
bled professionally as a broker and in
advertising before becoming a profes-
sor. “I’m trying to get rid of everything
so I can do the one thing I’ve always
cared to do,” he remembers thinking,
“which is to be a writer.” He chronicled
much of his youth in his first book, the
1994 literary memoir Out of Egypt. In
addition to his memoir and novels, Aci-
man has written multiple essay collec-
tions and edited one about Proust.
Guadagnino, the Call Me by Your
Name director, recalls Aciman speak-
ing to him in “beautiful Italian” over
breakfast in New York when they met
for the first time to discuss the movie.
The director says Aciman allowed him‘Whenever
you go into
somebody’s
head—
anyone’s
head—it’s all
insecurity.’
ANDRÉ ACIMANTimeOff Opener
BOOKS
The story continues, after all
By Rich Juzwiak