Enigma Variations - Paperback

by André Aciman (Author)

From Andr Aciman, the author of Call Me by Your Name (now a major motion picture and the winner of the Oscar(TM) for Best Adapted Screenplay) comes "a sensory masterclass, absorbing, intelligent, unforgettable" (Times Literary Supplement).

Enigma Variations charts the life of a man named Paul, whose loves remain as consuming and as covetous throughout his adulthood as they were in his adolescence. Whether the setting is southern Italy, where as a boy he has a crush on his parents' cabinetmaker, or a snowbound campus in New England, where his enduring passion for a girl he'll meet again and again over the years is punctuated by anonymous encounters with men--whether he's on a tennis court in Central Park or on a New York sidewalk in early spring. Paul's attachments are ungraspable, transient, and forever underwritten by raw desire.

Ahead of every step Paul takes, his hopes, denials, fears, and regrets are always ready to lay their traps. Yet the dream of love lingers. We may not always 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.

Author Biography

André Aciman is the author of Eight White Nights, Call Me by Your Name, Out of Egypt, False Papers, Alibis, and Harvard Square, and the editor of The Proust Project (all published by FSG). He teaches comparative literature at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and lives with his wife in Manhattan.