Love

Find Me      André Aciman     (2019)

In 2007,  André Aciman’s novel Call Me by Your Name broke new ground for love stories in presenting the relationship between a teenaged Elio and graduate student Oliver, who was the houseguest of Elio’s professor father in a small Italian town. Elio—preternaturally brilliant, a gifted pianist—is smitten by Oliver, who is handsome, worldly, and similarly brilliant. The language in Call Me by Your Name is lush and erudite; the story is heartbreaking.

In 2019, Aciman’s Find Me revisits the lives of Elio, Elio’s father, and Oliver years later; you can read it as a sequel to Call Me by Your Name or as a standalone novel. There are three sections to Find Me. “Tempo” tells about Elio’s father, Sami, meeting a much younger woman, Miranda, on a train rumbling south from Florence to Rome. In the “Cadenza” section, an adult Elio meets the much older Michel in Paris. Finally, in “Capriccio,” we catch up with Oliver, who’s been living on the East Coast of the United States.

You’ll like reading Find Me if you like

• Honest and incisive dialogue that drives the plot. Here is Elio talking to Sami: “You taught me how to love—how to love books, music, beautiful ideas, people, pleasure, even myself. Better yet you taught me that we have one life only and that time is always stacked against us.” (112)

• Wise aphorisms that stop you in your tracks. Two examples: “Music is no more than the sound of our regrets put to a cadence that stirs the illusion of pleasure and hope.” (238)  “Sometimes it’s best to stop things when they’re perfect rather than race on and watch them sour.” (136)

• Descriptions that go beyond window-dressing to probe character: “Miranda put down her fork and lit a cigarette. I watched her shake the match with a decisive hand motion before dropping it into an ashtray. How strong and invulnerable she suddenly seemed. She was showing her other side, the one that makes hasty indictments, then shuts them off and never lets them back in except when she weakens, only to hold it against them that she did. Men were like matches: they caught fire and were shaken off and dropped in the first ashtray that came her way.” (42)  Oh, here’s another: I liked her slim feet, and her smooth shoulders gleaming with a summer’s tan that seemed to resent letting the scent of last weekend’s sunscreen wear off. Above all I liked her forehead, which was not flat but rounded and which hinted at thoughts I couldn’t put into words but wanted to know better, because there was a wry afterthought visibly floating on her features every time she flashed a smile. (219)

• Plots that turn on deep and profound love, both gay and straight.

I found the third section of Find Me, Oliver’s story, occasionally confusing, so I had to slow down in my reading race to see how the plot resolved. Savor this one, readers.

Two Novels about Musicians

Love Is Blind:  The Rapture of Brodie Moncur     William Boyd     (2018)

Brodie Moncur was born with perfect pitch, and this is his ticket out of the grasp of his alcoholic father and repressive family situation in rural Scotland in the 1890s. Brodie’s superb piano-tuning abilities take him to a shop in Paris, where he suggests an endorsement scheme to help sell pianos. This is how he comes to be the tuner for concert pianist John Kilbarron. Brodie travels around the European continent in Kilbarron’s entourage and falls in love with Kilbarron’s mistress, the elusive Russian soprano Lika Blum. Difficulties result.  

Keep the title of this novel in mind: Brodie is blind to all the danger that his head-over-heels passion draws him into. I was on tenterhooks with worry about his affair with Lika being discovered, and I got fully immersed in the melodrama of the great but erratic and fading pianist Kilbarron and Kilbarron’s slimily malevolent brother, Malachi. Flitting from city to city, the fin de siècle characters inhabit sites deftly conjured with only a few broad strokes of description by the novelist. In each locale they create great music or make love or evade discovery, always seeming very much of their era.

The writing here is lyrical and effortless, sweeping the reader along and creating sympathy for Brodie’s plight. Late in the novel he ruminates: “It was astonishing how quickly life could change, how the ground moved beneath you and the landscape you thought you were living in turned out to be entirely different. Like waking up after an earthquake.” (303)

The weaknesses of Boyd’s story lie in the failure to develop fully the tantalizing story line about Brodie’s family and the lack of substance in the depiction of Lika. Even acknowledging these faults, Love Is Blind is a solid read.

The Ensemble     Aja Gabel     (2018)

Playing in a high-powered string quartet is challenging to the body as well as to the mind; the personal interactions of the four musicians, both on stage and off, are also a part of the mix. Novelist Aja Gabel, described on the dust jacket as “a former cellist,” has an insider’s understanding of the musical details as well as of the relationships involved in chamber music performance.

She introduces readers to the fictional Van Ness Quartet: Jana (hard-driving first violinist), Brit (reserved second violinist), Henry (note-perfect violist), and Daniel (unhappy cellist). If you played in your high school orchestra or if you’ve sung in a choral group or if you’ve collected all three of Yo-Yo Ma’s recordings of the Bach “Cello Suites,” you may appreciate the many musical insights about performances of the quartet. If you know little about classical music, you’ll miss some of the subtleties about the rehearsals and performances of the quartet, but you can still enjoy the plot and the very good character development of this novel.

For my review of another novel about a musician, click here.

An Unlikely Marriage

This Must Be the Place     Maggie O’Farrell     (2016)

Maggie O’Farrell trusts her readers to catch on to what’s she’s doing with her oblique plot lines. She trusts that readers won’t jump ship when she suddenly shifts the setting to another hemisphere. She especially trusts that readers will take note of her chapter titles, which include the name of the person whose point of view is adopted for that chapter, as well as the city and year in which that chapter takes place. It’s dizzying at first, but once you get used to it, there’s a bit of a reader buzz at the beginning of each chapter. Oh, now you’re in Donegal, Ireland, in 2010, with Daniel narrating in first person. Then, hello, Brooklyn 1944! It’s a third-person narrative about Teresa, who turns out to be Daniel’s mother. And welcome to Goa, India, in 1996, with a third-person narrative about Claudette, Daniel’s second wife. Decades and continents whizz past as you put the pieces of the plot together.

This Must Be the Place ends up being a character study of two people who both have immense talents and big hearts but also serious flaws. Their lives are messy, peopled by previous lovers and by children with problems of their own. Daniel Sullivan is an American linguistics professor who has lost custody of his children in a contentious divorce from his first wife. On a trip to Ireland to retrieve his grandfather’s ashes, Daniel comes across a young boy on the roadside in Donegal. This is how he meets Claudette Wells, the boy’s mother, who is a recluse in the mountains, having fled a life of international stardom and infernal paparazzi. Daniel and Claudette fall in love.

Readers get the life histories of both Daniel and Claudette through those chapters that flash back and forth in time. Some of the chapters border on gimmicky, especially the one that’s a catalog of Claudette’s personal objects that are put up for auction, complete with inset photos. Some of the plot assumptions are wobbly. I doubt that Claudette could really have kept her presence in Ireland a secret for years—in rural Africa or South America, perhaps, but not in Ireland. And I can’t see how Daniel could get work permits for whatever country he was in. None of that matters, however, as O’Farrell reveals more and more about Daniel and Claudette, drawing readers into their struggles.

Along the way, O’Farrell’s descriptive passages work well. Here is Daniel narrating: “Winter is the best season to see Paris, I’ve always thought, when the pavements are sheer with frost, when the sun in low in the sky, when the Seine is swollen and brown, twisting fibrously beneath the bridges.” (266)

And here is Daniel being described when he is in a depressive state: “He is watching the red digital numbers of his alarm clock mutate into their successors: 5 gains an extra descender on its lower-left corner to become 6; to become 7, the 6 must lose almost all of itself, all its left-hand side, all its lower and middle strokes; the only consolation, he tells the 6-soon-to-be-7, is that you’ll get them all back for the full house that is 8. He watches the numbers tot themselves up, then spill over into another hour . . .” (295)

This Must Be the Place offers particularly excellent insights into the interdependence of partners in a marriage, and the portrayals of Daniel's and Claudette’s children are moving and believable. Overall, it’s a satisfying read. I plan to watch for future offerings from O’Farrell.