There's a very thoughtful review by writer and critic Helen Elliot, 'Sequel can't live up to first love' in the Review section of the Weekend Australian, January 4-5, 2020. I'm not sure if you can access it online before you have to pay a subscription. (I get the print edition on the weekend because the Review section has very good articles but the main part of the newspaper is one of the Dirty Digger's egregious rightwing outlets.)
Inter alia, Helen Elliott writes:
" [Aciman's] scholarly interest/obsession is Proust and Proustian sensibility filters everything he writes. Call Me By Your Name --- is a magnificent evocation of first love."
After commenting on the film and TC and AH's performances , she writes:
"We might not have read Proust but it is Proustian, and possibly human, to long to know what happens to the beautiful Elio and the charming Oliver ...
"As much as a novel is a mirror that reflects some usually unreflectable aspect of ourselves, it can also be a glimpse of the ideal. The hope for every reader - in love with Elio and Oliver because they have managed what we all yearn for in love - is that they will find one another again and live happily ever after. (We never really get over fairytales.) The point of the Proustian Aciman is that, over the course of our lives we are searching for that one great love, great because it is an effortless reflection of ourselves.
"Sheer fantasy. Except Aciman's skills as an observer of human nature and an unusual ability to mingle soft porn with high flown thought and ardent speech made us believe finding the one great love is possible.
"It is tedious having to explain yourself to the world. But silence is lonely, so when you meet another whose thoughts and character are an immaculate fit with your own, you are more than half in love. If they happen to be physically desirable "half in love" becomes headlong, but, as Proust revealed, time is the real, and most dissolute, player in falling in love. The nature of desire is that it cannot stand still. Shakespeare checked this in the piercing Sonnet 129, Th' Expense of Spirit in a Waste of Shame, defining the exact course of desire, chased, fulfilled and then remembered. Heroin users say there is nothing like that first shot and they are compelled to keep chasing. First love is first love, and in Aciman's view great loves don't cease because every desire has been fulfilled. You just have to find the courage to pursue them. But he also realises that you might simultaneously be in love with another, or others, while you maintain a constant vigil over the one great love. As I said, Proust figures in the filter."
Describing Tempo, Helen Elliott writes of Sami and Miranda:
"... We are to believe each has found the love of their lives.
"I read all this with sinking heart. Only an older man would write this fantasy and Roth is dead. The writing is awkward, probably because of the falsity beneath the fantasy
"What kept me reading were the bits that fall from elsewhere, acute and true... I also wanted to get to Elio and Oliver.
"...Cadenza ... is a virtuoso display of Elio's charms. Sigh.
"I read again with sinking heart and further irritation but again, was saved by moments of truth and insight...
"... Da Capo is what the reader really has been wanting. To see Elio and Oliver united, to have re-found each other. To see if soulmates can really outrun time.
"Call Me By Your Name worked because Aciman risked writing about moments most writers avoid, brought his unusual, acute sensibility to bear on the dazzling urgency of first love. The power of some love can, indeed, stop time.
The pleasures of that novel and the curiosity about what happens to the enchanting Elio and Oliver will sell Find Me. But, despite some brilliant and many moving moments, it is a stiff reminder that sequels, from Little Women to Seven Little Australians, are generally ill-advised"
