Enigma Variations

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

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