Tuesday, January 30, 2024

4:42 PM | Do Not Find Me

I am finally done reading this. I struggled! Have you ever read a book that is so excruciating to read, but still mean to finish regardless of your fraying sanity because the memory of the book it is a sequel to is sacred to you? I loved Call Me By Your Name when I read it years ago, even way before the movie came out in 2017. I devoured it within a day, and my copy still occupies a singular place in my bookshelves. There really shouldn't have been a sequel.

But Andre Aciman, perhaps to satisfy a commercial demand brought on by the success of the movie, returns to tell more of Elio's and Oliver's tales. But this time, the language that was so ravishing in the first book — I remember it occasionally made me breathless, and I often stopped reading between paragraphs in sheer writerly jealousy — became so plodding and overwrought in this book. And Aciman knows it.



I've highlighted this passage from Find Me that shows him knowing full well that the tenor of his language was off. [It's the usual excuse by writers who cannot pen meaningfully realistic dialogues.]

And then to begin this book with a loooong section focusing on Elio's father meeting, in a train, a woman he would eventually seduce and marry. That section ["Tempo"] took me months to finish, because I certainly was not interested to read about the sexual escapades and cringy flirtations of Elio's FATHER. It is the longest section, too, significantly eclipsing Elio's section ["Cadenza"], which inexplicably devolved into a strange and unnecessary mystery involving a long-dead composer. Oliver's section ["Capriccio"] was the shortest of all, just a few pages of him trying to get it on with a man and a woman at his farewell party, while day-dreaming about love lost in Elio. The coda ["Da Capo"], when Elio and Oliver finally get together, is so short and so anti-climactic, it is a let-down of extreme proportions -- because we simply have come not to care anymore about Elio and Oliver after all that.

If you love Call Me By Your Name, avoid Find Me at all cost.

Labels: books, queer

[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich

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