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Enigma Variations
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)
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‘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.
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.
Aciman’s description of love is devastatingly, excruciatingly real.
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.
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.
You don't so much read André Aciman's novels as tumble breathlessly into them . . . Enigma Variations, an intoxicating, rueful tale of one man's life in love as he tries to determine which – if any – melody line will prove dominant . . . Aciman is a precise and sympathetic chronicler of the hopelessly infatuated . . . his extended, fervid sentences cunningly tuck away truths that become apparent only later in the narrative, reflecting the games we play to protect ourselves from our conflicted desires
'It's a spellbinding novel, which conjures up all the light and shade of longing. The intensity of feeling never lets up.
Aciman is particularly strong at channeling the ache of infatuation in this intense book that reaches beyond the narrator's self-regard to ask big questions about sexual desire.
André Aciman is the New York Times bestselling author of Call Me By Your Name, Out of Egypt, Eight White Nights, False Papers, Alibis, and Harvard Square, Enigma Variations, Find Me, and the essay collection Homo Irrealis. He’s the editor of The Proust Project and teaches comparative literature at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He…
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