Enigma Variations
From the multi-million copy bestselling author of Call Me By Your Name
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3.6 • 17 Ratings
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- £6.49
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- £6.49
Publisher Description
'Magnificent.' New York Times
'Unforgettable.' Times Literary Supplement
'Exquisite.' New Yorker
From the Sunday Times bestselling author of Call Me by Your Name and Find Me, now available to preorder in paperback.
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.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
André Aciman’s 2007 debut, Call Me By Your Name—the inspiration for one of 2017’s most acclaimed films—is an absorbing study of passion and sexual awakening. His fourth novel explores similar themes, telling one man’s history of love—from childhood to middle age—through a series of connected short stories. Few writers evoke the fire and anguish of desire as sharply as Aciman—his heady, intimate prose immersed us in a kaleidoscope of emotions and delivers some satisfying plot twists. As his richly drawn lead character Paul moves from one affair to the next, Aciman exposes many relatable truths about love and infatuation.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A breathless, sketched rendering of one man's life in love, Aciman's novel speaks earnestly not only of longing and lust, but also of more complicated emotions "the lightning and then silence" of unrequited attraction, and the mutable desire "neither to be on this side of the river nor on the other but on the space and transit in between." Paul's first crush, during his adolescence in Italy, is a handsome, talented local craftsman employed by his family; considering his passion for Giovanni "my first encounter with time," Paul returns to the island of San Giustiniano as a young man out of college, only to discover that the real object of Giovanni's interest was much closer than he supposed. Adult life in New York brings Paul no new clarity: suspecting his girlfriend, Maud, of cheating on him with a handsome visitor, he becomes drawn to the visitor himself. Finally entering into a relationship with fellow tennis player Manfred, he engages in periodic encounters with Chloe, a college friend with whom he shares a fraught but enduring connection: "we loved with every organ but the heart." Resorting occasionally to belabored and repetitive language, Aciman (Call Me by Your Name) nevertheless portrays Paul convincingly as a sensuous and self-aware figure, forever treading the border between melodrama and tragedy. Coming to terms with his sexuality, by midlife Paul has "grown to love serving two masters perhaps so as never truly to answer to either one."
Customer Reviews
Disappointing
Started good but then I didn’t really get the point. Like a book of short stories not a novel.