Enigma Variations

October 3, 2016
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—“the lightning and then silence” of unrequited attraction, and the mutable desire “neither to be on this side of the river nor on the other but on the space and transit in between.” Paul’s first crush, during his adolescence in Italy, is a handsome, talented local craftsman employed by his family; considering his passion for Giovanni “my first encounter with time,” Paul returns to the island of San Giustiniano as a young man out of college, only to discover that the real object of Giovanni’s interest was much closer than he supposed. Adult life in New York brings Paul no new clarity: suspecting his girlfriend, Maud, of cheating on him with a handsome visitor, he becomes drawn to the visitor himself. Finally entering into a relationship with fellow tennis player Manfred, he engages in periodic encounters with Chloe, a college friend with whom he shares a fraught but enduring connection: “we loved with every organ but the heart.” Resorting occasionally to belabored and repetitive language, Aciman (Call Me by Your Name) nevertheless portrays Paul convincingly as a sensuous and self-aware figure, forever treading the border between melodrama and tragedy. Coming to terms with his sexuality, by midlife Paul has “grown to love serving two masters—perhaps so as never truly to answer to either one.”

October 15, 2016
Love among the ruins--and with Ethan Frome, tennis, martinis, and Starbucks on the set as well.As often in his fiction, Aciman (Harvard Square, 2013, etc.) immerses readers in a milieu that is achingly sensuous--and sensual, too--with not much regard for pedestrian ideas of what constitutes whatever normal behavior is supposed to be. Even so, his characters are often beset by moral agony over the choices they make in following their hearts. In the case of Paul, a definitively sensitive man of fleetingly passing years, just about everything is a Proustian madeleine: Greek and Latin, the glint of Mediterranean sunlight, "the cooling scent of coffee from the roasting mill that seemed to welcome me no differently now than when I ran errands with my mother." Then there is music, so elegantly alluded to in the title, and the memories of men and women who have fallen in his path and bed and sometimes imparted wisdom along the way; as an early object of desire says, knowingly, "It could be life or it could be a strip of wood that refuses to bend as it should." Paul bends easily in his pursuits, broadly catholic in his affinities. Aciman's portrait of him and his world is thoughtful, sympathetic, and never prurient; Paul is very much, as a friend of his remarks, like Sicily in having many identities and "all manner of names, when in fact one, and one only, is good enough." He is not at all reprehensible, yet he is not blameless, either; Paul's quest for self-awareness, to say nothing of his quest for pleasure, carries plenty of collateral damage. Most of it he bears himself, though; as he says, with knowing resignation, "I think everyone is wounded in their sex...I can't think of one person who isn't." An eminently adult look at desire and attachment, with all the usual regrets and then some--but also with the knowledge that such regret "is easy enough to live down."

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November 1, 2016
Always searching for more, for something that isn't there, and wondering if finding true love happens only oncethese are the twin themes upon which Aciman (Harvard Square, 2013) artfully constructs his latest deeply felt novel. Paul, in his early twenties, returns to his family's summer home on an island off the coast of Italy, which had been the setting for his first but unspoken and unacted-upon love in his adolescence. Giovanni is the local cabinetmaker whose gentle shadow is cast over Paul's life forever. Consequently, Paul conducts his relationships with both male and female lovers from an emotional distance: no one can replace Giovanni. Years later, when Paul returns to the island, which his family no longer visits after their summer house burned to the ground, to come face to face with Giovanni once more, he finds that many things have changed over the years. Aciman's sensuous, subtle language supports not only his marvelous descriptive power but also how deeply and resonantly he constructs his fondly and fully conceived characters.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)

September 1, 2016

Out of Egypt memoirist Aciman, who emerged as a novelist with 2007's Let Me Call Your Name, here chronicles the passions of a young man named Paul, from a preadolescent crush on his parents' cabinetmaker to his passion for a young woman at his New England college, to numerous encounters with men he tries to capture body and soul.

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

November 1, 2016

During a dinner party--with two of his lovers sitting at the table--Paul, the protagonist of this urbane novel, muses on the possibility of multiple lives occurring simultaneously: one lived in ordinary time; another that bursts and fizzles; another that is achievable but that somehow we end up not living. Handsome, bisexual, and a member of New York's creative class, Paul is haunted by too many choices. The story inhabits his interior world of sexual desires; New York City, though richly rendered, is a pale backdrop to his finely parsed ruminations and recriminations. His work is barely mentioned, though we know it allows him to arrive late after tennis and leave early for lunch and dinner dates. But this isn't a prurient tale; years pass while Paul hesitantly pursues a male tennis partner, a former college girlfriend, a young female writer. His sexual experiences and attitudes are colored by his unattainable first love, a cabinetmaker he met as a teenager in Italy, where his parents had a summer home. VERDICT Aciman's (Tell Me Your Name) sophisticated and erudite novel is constructed of chapters that feel like interlocking stories. Despite the plot's sexual feints and infidelities, the tone is curiously humorless. [See Prepub Alert, 7/25/16.]--Reba Leiding, emeritus, James Madison Univ. Lib., Harrisonburg, VA

Copyright 2016 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.