Enigma Variations, Andre Aciman
Enigma Variations, Andre Aciman
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Enigma Variations
A Novel

Author: André Aciman

Narrator: Edoardo Ballerini

Unabridged: 7 hr 39 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 08/23/2022


Synopsis

From the New York Times bestselling author of Call Me By Your Name, a passionate portrait of love’s contradictory power, in five illuminating stories.

André Aciman, hailed as a writer of “fiction at its most supremely interesting” (The New York Review of Books), has written a novel that 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, 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 Enigma Variations, Aciman maps the most inscrutable corners of passion, proving to be an unsparing reader of the human psyche and a master stylist. With language at once lyrical, bare-knuckled, and unabashedly candid, 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 those who may want to offer only what we crave from them. 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.

A Macmillan Audio production from Farrar, Straus and Giroux

About André Aciman

André Aciman is the New York Times bestselling author of Call Me By Your Name, Out of Egypt, Eight White Nights, False Papers, Alibis, Harvard Square, Enigma Variations, and Find Me. He's the editor of The Proust Project and teaches comparative literature at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He lives with his wife in Manhattan.

About Edoardo Ballerini

Edoardo Ballerini is an American writer, director, film producer and actor.  He has won many awards for his audiobook narration; within only a few years after beginning his narrating career, he won several AudioFile Earphones Awards for his work, including Stephen Greenblatt’s The Swerve: How The World Became Modern, Jodi Picoult’s The Storyteller and Jess Walter’s Beautiful Ruins.   He narrated Kenzaburo Oe’s Nobel Prize Winning Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids, Joseph Finder’s The Moscow Club as well as works by John Edward and Daniel Stashower.   In television and film, he is best known for his role in The Sopranos, 24, I Shot Andy Warhol, Dinner Rush and Romeo Must Die. The silky-voiced Ballerini is trained in theater and continues to do much work on stage.


Reviews

Goodreads review by John on February 08, 2023

The "Enigma Variations" referenced in the title are a set of orchestral pieces by the English composer, Edward Elgar, consisting of 14 variations on a common melodic theme. The use of the word "Enigma" in the title has led classical music lovers to wonder if there may be some hidden puzzle buried in......more

Goodreads review by Kyle on February 04, 2018

There was an emotional detachedness to the novel for me. Never once did I feel any sort of deep connection to the protagonist, which left me feeling listless the whole way through. I guess I expected more— something along the lines of the sweeping romanticism and longing of Aciman’s first novel— but......more

Goodreads review by Gerhard on February 06, 2017

I am a huge fan of Aciman, but this just did not work for me. The strongest section is the first; there is little to tie the five together, so this is really just a loosely bound collection of disparate novellas. Plus the fact that the central protagonist is so reprehensibly louche and dissolute tha......more


Quotes

"Aciman writes arousal so beautifully you miss it when it's gone . . . [Aciman is] up to something bolder this time . . . Aciman is all the way himself here. He writes with the ferocity of a writer who's finally getting his vision down, and he has to say it, has to get it out. He's made a magnificent, living thing." —Paul Lisicky, New York Times Book Review

"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 . . . [Aciman] portrays Paul convincingly as a sensuous and self-aware figure, forever treading the border between melodrama and tragedy." —Publishers Weekly

"Is there any writer out there who can conjure the seismic swings and loop-the-loop giddiness of sexual infatuation the way that André Aciman can? He first revealed this talent in his debut novel, Call Me By Your Name, the book that sealed his reputation along with his sublime memoir, Out of Egypt . . . The allure of Enigma Variations rests in its agile sense of the heart’s paradoxes and might-have-beens." —Michael Upchurch, Boston Globe