Find Me

André Aciman is the best-selling author of several works of fiction and nonfiction, including the modern classic Call Me by Your Name (2007), which was adapted into the Academy Award–winning 2017 film of the same name. Find Me is a sequel to Call Me by Your Name but stands on its own. Split into four parts, Find Me explores the power of romantic connections between characters of varying ages and situations. The rotating points of view express that true love and desire are universal and inherently human experiences. Aciman’s philosophical and romantic novel considers the influence of time on the individual.

This study guide refers to the 2020 Macmillan edition.

Plot Summary

In Part 1, “Tempo,” Samuel Perlman takes a train to Rome to visit his adult son Elio, a pianist. Samuel is a divorced classics scholar who feels his life’s best moments are behind him. He is taken by a young, beautiful woman who sits across from him on the train. They strike up a conversation and quickly find an intimate banter. They seem to understand one another in mysterious ways but are ultimately still strangers. When the train arrives in Rome, the woman, Miranda, invites Samuel to spend the day with her and her father. As Samuel spends the day shopping, cooking, and eating with Miranda, she and Samuel fall in love. They feel that they are compatible souls finding each other in a random moment of sublime passion. They have sex, and Samuel invites Miranda to move in with him in his house by the sea. Miranda readily agrees and breaks up with her boyfriend so she can be with Samuel. Miranda meets Elio, who welcomes her on his vigils with his father. These vigils are strolls around Rome in which Elio and Samuel visit the settings of their treasured memories. Samuel and Miranda have an intense connection, but they both distrust romantic relationships as fleeting and ultimately boring. Still, they seek one another’s deepest intimacies and believe that this new, unexpected relationship is born of magic. Samuel in particular is in awe of this new, passionate connection. He always wanted a connection this deep and transcendent, but he hadn’t expected it to come this late in his life.

Part 2, “Cadenza,” takes place five years after Part 1. Elio now lives in Paris, where he is a concert pianist and a music teacher in a conservatory. Elio goes to a church to attend the concert of the Florian Quartet. There, he meets an older, handsome man called Michel. They instantly take a liking to each other and recognize one another’s attraction. They go on a date, and then make plans for the next week. Two days later, Michel surprises Elio at work. They start a passionate relationship. Both Michel and Elio feel truly seen and known by the other. Though their togetherness has some awkward moments, they have a soulful connection. They thoroughly discuss the loves of their past, and Michel intuits that Elio is still in love with Oliver, a man from his past. Michel and Elio also discuss fate, which Michel believes in, but Elio doesn’t.

On a trip to his country home, Michel shows Elio a sonata gifted to his father by a man named Léon; he suspects they had an affair. This sonata is a secret; no one knows of it besides Michel, his now-deceased father, and now Elio. Elio plays the sonata on the piano and discovers it is actually a cadenza that combines elements of different compositions. Elio is surprised to find that the cadenza, which is marked as from 1944, has melodies from the Kol Nidre, implying that Léon was Jewish. Fascinated, Elio investigates Léon, finally determining that he was a musician by the name of Ariel Waldstein who was a member of the Florian Quartet—meaning he used to play in the same church in which Elio and Michel met—and was killed in a concentration camp for refusing to relinquish his violin. Elio tells Michel about his upcoming tour of the United States, where he plans to meet up with Oliver after 15 years, and Michel reflects that he is not the right man for Elio.

In Part 3, “Capriccio,” the narrative extends another few years and turns to Oliver’s perspective. Oliver and wife Micol are hosting a farewell party in their emptying New York City apartment. Oliver is a career academic, and he’s been on sabbatical at a university in New York. Now they are returning to New Hampshire. Two people important to Oliver attend the party: Erica, a beautiful woman Oliver met at yoga class, and Paul, a handsome acquaintance from the university. He invited both because of his attraction to them. While Oliver hosts the party, he tries to catch moments alone with them. Paul plays the piano for the guests, which evokes 20-year-old memories of Elio. The party ends without Oliver acting on his attraction to Erica and Oliver, and Micol goes to bed, leaving him to drink, smoke, and ruminate on the past. He has an imaginary conversation with Bach in which they discuss the power of music to move the soul, and then an imaginary conversation with Elio about their love for one another. When he goes to sleep, Oliver dreams of having sex with Paul and Erica at the same time. Though Oliver loves his wife and thinks they make a good team, he is dissatisfied with much of his life and still longs for Elio.

In Part 4, “Da Capo,” Oliver leaves his wife and reunites with Elio at Samuel’s seaside house. Samuel is dead, leaving behind Miranda and their seven-year-old son, Ollie. Oliver and Elio restart their romantic and sexual relationship. They are happy to be together again, but the memories evoked by the crowded house, which is also inhabited by Miranda, Ollie, and Elio’s mother, inhibit them. Elio worries that he remembers more about their past than Oliver does, but because Oliver has sacrificed much to be with Elio, he doesn’t want to dwell on the past. On a trip around the Mediterranean coast to get time alone, they discuss their love for one another and both declare that they had been waiting for the other to find them.