Description

From the New York Times bestselling author of Call Me By Your Name a passionate portrait of loves contradictory power in five illuminating stories

Andr 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 hell meet again and again over the years is punctuated by anonymous encounters with men whether hes 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 desirenot for just one persons body but inevitably for someone elses 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 bareknuckled 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 weve always known we were

A Macmillan Audio production from Farrar Straus and Giroux