(He’s 68.) His books endlessly pour out ways to say, “I love you,” without saying, “I love you.” He denies being a romantic but concedes that is he perhaps a “romantic - with a sense of irony.” His medium is literature, yet he believes classical music is the “topmost layer of aesthetic production of mankind.” Find Me’s four chapters are named after musical terms (“Tempo,” “Cadenza,” “Capriccio” and “Da Capo”). He writes wise books about the nature of love and time and the inter-actions of those forces, and yet he claims to think like a 14-year-old. Aciman is “generous,” Guadagnino says, and “does not perceive everything from the perspective of his own art.”īut to hear Aciman tell it in a word, he’s “weird.” He is certainly unpredictable. Guadagnino has discussed wanting to make a sequel to Call Me by Your Name and has spoken publicly about prominently featuring the AIDS crisis in the version he is writing, but he says he hopes to meet with Aciman in New York and discuss combining their visions. The director says Aciman allowed him and his crew freedom with the source material. Guadagnino, the Call Me by Your Name director, recalls Aciman speaking to him in “beautiful Italian” over breakfast in New York when they met for the first time to discuss the movie. In addition to his memoir and novels, Aciman has written multiple essay collections and edited one about Proust. “I’m trying to get rid of everything so I can do the one thing I’ve always cared to do,” he remembers thinking, “which is to be a writer.” He chronicled much of his youth in his first book, the 1994 literary memoir Out of Egypt. They were left with nothing as refugees and spent three years in Rome before finding their way to New York to rebuild in 1968.Īciman studied as an undergrad at New York’s Lehman College, then dabbled professionally as a broker and in advertising before becoming a professor. When he was 14, his Jewish family was kicked out of largely Muslim Alexandria after their business was nationalized and their assets were seized. Growing up, Aciman developed the worldly existence he would come to show through his characters, moving from Egypt to Italy to France to the U.S., all by the time he was 17.

When emphasizing, his eyebrows arch into crescents as if shielding his face from a torrent of thoughts. (Aciman spent his childhood speaking French in Alexandria, Egypt.) Soon he grows passionate, waving his arms.

As we face each other on identical beige couches, he barely pauses after questions before delivering long, eloquent answers in his unplaceable accent. We sit in the living room of the apartment he shares with his wife of nearly 32 years, where they raised their three sons. In person, Aciman speaks like the dialogue in Find Me, rhythmic and philosophizing.

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