MixedThe New RepublicThat Find Me is discontinuous with its ostensible precursor is a strength, not a weakness, that allows us to see familiar people and places afresh, in new stages of life ... The first two sections of Find Me, the furthest in time from Elio and Oliver’s reunion, are the book’s most powerful. They showcase Aciman’s finest mode: sketching the contours of a relationship through its small confidences, gestures, and extended conversations that dispense with naturalism in favor of exposing the essence of the pair’s dynamic, its delicate back-and-forth play, balanced on the edge of their passions ... the closer we get to the return of the original pairing, the less convincing that commentary becomes. In the penultimate section, Oliver’s obsessive musings on Elio at the party beggared the belief of this reader, usually happy to inhabit a surreal, dreamlike mood but unsettled by a man who feels he’s wasted the last 20 years of his life yet hasn’t done a thing about it except whimper into the ether ... The final section, the novel’s least impressive on the levels of sentence and subject matter, affords wish fulfillment for readers who believe in the inexorable pull of fate, or soulmates, or who simply couldn’t stand to see their striking young paramours separated for good. I remain, for my part, flummoxed ... What Aciman does so deftly in the novel’s first two sections is construct a world that runs parallel to the one we left in Call Me by Your Name, one with some recognizable faces, bearing the imprint of the past but embroiled in new stories, ones we can become invested in on their own narrative merits. Elio and Oliver’s reunion, by contrast, comes off as a regression, a bleating insistence that nothing has changed since that lusty summer, and that the intervening decades might be discarded with a wave of the hand. It does a disservice, I think, to that lush, delirious romance, luminously rendered in the best of Aciman’s prose, to imply that it invalidates the next 20 years of these men’s lives. That Aciman lapses here into melodrama and cliché suggests he isn’t convinced, either.
Katie Roiphe
RaveThe Los Angeles Review of BooksTo spend a few hours in the company of a narrator like Kalanithi, such an urgent, pulsing presence on the page, you can hardly believe he is gone ... Like any memoir of terminal illness, it is saturated with the author’s awareness that this is it, his last chance to make himself known to those he loves and those who will only ever experience him on the page ... Kalanithi makes his narrative of development fresh for readers of all backgrounds, in part by recounting discoveries of the philosophical complexities woven into the practice of medicine ... Dr. Lucy Kalanithi, Paul’s widow, has contributed a devastating epilogue to When Breath Becomes Air ... When Breath Becomes Air does what all great literature does: it allows a man whose life belongs to the past to endure.
Paul Kalanithi
RaveThe Los Angeles Review of BooksTo spend a few hours in the company of a narrator like Kalanithi, such an urgent, pulsing presence on the page, you can hardly believe he is gone ... Like any memoir of terminal illness, it is saturated with the author’s awareness that this is it, his last chance to make himself known to those he loves and those who will only ever experience him on the page ... Kalanithi makes his narrative of development fresh for readers of all backgrounds, in part by recounting discoveries of the philosophical complexities woven into the practice of medicine ... Dr. Lucy Kalanithi, Paul’s widow, has contributed a devastating epilogue to When Breath Becomes Air ... When Breath Becomes Air does what all great literature does: it allows a man whose life belongs to the past to endure.
