Enigma Variations

A passionate portrait of love’s contradictory power, in five illuminating stories

André Aciman, who has been called “the most exciting new fiction writer of the twenty-first century” (New York magazine), has written a novel that chronicles the life of Paul, whose loves remain as consuming and covetous throughout his life as they were in adolescence. Whether in southern Italy, where as a boy he has a crush on his parents’ cabinetmaker; or on a snowbound campus in New England, where his enduring passion for a girl he’ll meet again and again over the years is counterpointed by anonymous encounters with other men; or on a tennis court in Central Park; or on a sidewalk in early spring in New York, his attachments are ungraspable, transient, and forever underwritten by raw desire—not for just one person’s body but, inevitably, for someone else’s as well. In charting the most inscrutable corners of desire, Aciman proves to be an unsparing reader of the human psyche, soul, and libido, and a master stylist of contemporary literature. With language at once lyrical, bare-knuckled, and unabashedly candid in Enigma Variations, he casts a sensuous, 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 who may want only to offer what we crave from them. Behind every step the hero takes, his hopes, denials, fears, and regrets are ready to lay their traps. Yet the dream of love casts its luminous halo. We may not know what we want. We may remain enigmas to ourselves and others. But sooner or later we discover who we’ve always known we were.