I went to the Strand this week to see André Aciman—of the Call Me By Your Name book (and movie) fame—having just finished his new title, Find Me.
Aciman is a very entertaining, funny, and generous interviewee. Find Me is in parts a playful read, which was to some extent mirrored by my experience of its creator in real life.
Find Me is not a sequel to Call Me By Your Name, at least not so in the strict sense. Aciman teases us by not allowing Elio into the narrative until Part 2, which starts almost midway through the book. Oliver reappears much later, almost at the end. Aciman shared the fact that, particularly in Call Me By Your Name, he was not that much interested in Oliver’s character. Aciman tends to focus almost exclusively on the very few central protagonists, those peripheral to the narrative remaining shadowy and ill-defined. Take Elio’s mother, for example. In Call Me By Your Name she is sidelined and pretty featureless. The movie changed this, developing her character and giving her more of a role in the storyline. Aciman was, and remains so in his new book, more interested in Elio’s father, and thus Find Me opens with him (Samuel, named as such in the movie but not in Call Me By Your Name), and in fact gives him the largest protagonist share of the narrative.
This opening section—called Tempo—focuses on Samuel’s encounter with a younger woman. As Tempo suggests, time is a dominant theme here, and persists as a thread throughout the book. Early on, Samuel states that “…life and time are not in sync.”
He continues:
“None of us may want to claim to live life in two parallel lanes but all have many lives, one tucked beneath or right alongside the other. Some lives wait their turn because they haven’t been lived at all, while others die before they’ve lived out their time, and some are waiting to be relived because they haven’t been lived enough. Basically, we don’t know how to think of time. because time doesn’t really understand time the way we do, because time couldn’t care less what we think of time, because time is just a wobbly, unreliable metaphor for how we think about life. Because ultimately it isn’t time that is wrong for us, or we for time. It may be life itself that is wrong.”
I am fascinated by the concept of time, how we measure our lives by it, and how time delineates—and seems to control— a one way journey from birth to death. I agree with Aciman—time is not a useful metaphor for how we perceive our lived lives, yet it one that is omnipresent.
Aciman proceeds to “play” with the concept of time, and how it shapes the lives of his characters. Part 1, for example, focuses mostly on just one day, and then the immediately following days. In Part 2, we have traveled a few years to arrive at the timeline, remaining there for a matter of days. Obviously much has happened in the intervening years, but there is a strong sense that within those deliberately chosen days, these hours are where life truly takes shape, determining its owner’s direction in the years thereafter. So yes, life and time are indeed out of sync.
As in Call Me By Your Name, music is a dominant theme throughout Aciman’s new book. He believes that music, and the arts in general, do not change our lives, albeit the joy they bring. An imaginary conversation takes place between Oliver and J.S. Bach in Find Me:
“Music reminds me of what my life should have been. But it doesn’t change me…Music is no more than the sound of our regrets put to a cadence that stirs the illusion of pleasure and hope. It’s the surest reminder that we’ve neglected or cheated, or, worse yet, failed to live our lives. Music is the unlived life.”
Which brings me to another dominant theme—that of the life not lived. Aciman believes that we all have many potentially lives, a belief that I subscribe to, though it can be a challenging one to act positively on so that we truly realize our lived potentials. Adam Phillip’s Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life comes to mind:
“…one realizes how much of our so-called mental life is about the lives we are not living, the lives we are missing out on, the lives we could be leading but for some reason are not.”
“We refer to them as our unlived lives because somewhere we believe that they were open to us; but for some reason — and we might spend a great deal of our lived lives trying to find and give the reason — they were not possible. And what was not possible all too easily becomes the story of our lives. Indeed, our lived lives might become a protracted mourning for, or an endless tantrum about, the lives we were unable to live.”
“Our lives become an elegy to needs unmet and desires sacrificed, to possibilities refused, to roads not taken.”
And this brings me back to Find Me, and its emphasis on not having those regrets, not accepting your life as an elegy to “desires sacrificed”, but about choosing to go down one road, allowing for this to be the wrong choice, and ultimately re-navigating your path.
Find Me is a thoughtful, introspective, and philosophical read. It is ultimately an ode to love, to the possibilities of love, and the richness awarded to a life lived true to such possibilities.
CQ
Living through the Arts 