Enigma Variations - André Aciman

The magnificent new novel from the Sunday Times bestselling author of Call Me By Your Name, "the most exciting new fiction writer of the twenty-first century" (New York magazine) From a youthful infatuation with a cabinet maker in a small Italian fishing village, to a passionate yet sporadic affair with a woman in New York, to an obsession with a man he meets at a tennis court, Enigma Variations charts one man's path through the great loves of his life. Paul's intense desires, losses and longings draw him closer, not to a defined orientation, but to an understanding that 'heartache, like love, like low-grade fevers, like the longing to reach out and touch a hand across the table, is easy enough to live down'. André Aciman casts a shimmering light over each facet of desire, to probe how we ache, want and waver, and ultimately how we sometimes falter and let go of the very ones we want the most. We may not know what we want. We may remain enigmas to ourselves and to others. But sooner or later we discover who we've always known we were. Review A worthy successor to Aciman's Call Me By Your Name. It is a thing of beauty. taking simple words, everyday words, and transforming them into something new, into something that seems stolen from another language, something that translates that which had heretofore been untranslatable. ― New York Journal of Books Aciman's description of love is devastatingly, excruciatingly real. ― Los Angeles Review of Books This poetic novel charts rich emotional terrain that plumbs not only the depths of protagonist Paul's inner world, but also the many enigmatic expressions of love. Engima Variations is a trove of Proustian energies: the influence of memory, the anxiety around mothers, the sensual pleasure of smell and sight, themes which all enrich Aciman's already masterful and probing exegesis on love and longing. ― LAMBDA Progress through Enigma Variations, André Aciman's fourth novel, is best calculated not by the number of pages read, but by the strength of readerly connection with the narrator. The project is one of recognition and revelation within the reader: the book wants nothing less than the dissolution of your consciousness into its pixellated moments of psychological precision.. Loneliness, fear of shame, unrequited love light these pages.. We go with him the way we go with Anton Chekhov's characters, enmeshed in the humanness of the drama. ― The Millions