
Enigma Variations
A Novel
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Narrated by:
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Edoardo Ballerini
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By:
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André Aciman
About this listen
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
©2017 André Aciman (P)2022 Macmillan AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
"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
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Captivating!
- By Owen L on 02-01-22
By: André Aciman
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Lie with Me
- A Novel
- By: Philippe Besson, Molly Ringwald - translator
- Narrated by: Jacques Roy
- Length: 3 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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Just outside a hotel in Bordeaux, Philippe chances upon a young man who bears a striking resemblance to his first love. What follows is a look back at the relationship he’s never forgotten, a hidden affair with a gorgeous boy named Thomas during their last year of high school. Without ever acknowledging they know each other in the halls, they steal time to meet in secret, carrying on a passionate, world-altering affair.
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Memoir or fiction, either way it's enthralling.
- By Keith G on 05-08-19
By: Philippe Besson, and others
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Fellow Travelers
- By: Thomas Mallon
- Narrated by: Christian Barillas
- Length: 14 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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In a world of bare-knuckled ideology and secret dossiers, Timothy Laughlin, a recent college graduate and devout Catholic, is eager to join the crusade against Communism. An encounter with a handsome State Department official, Hawkins Fuller, leads to Tim's first job and, after Fuller's advances, his first love affair.
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The tying together of the story threads at the end.
- By Oscar Davila on 12-29-23
By: Thomas Mallon
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The Loves of My Life
- A Sex Memoir
- By: Edmund White
- Narrated by: Joel Froomkin
- Length: 6 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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Written with White’s signature honesty, irreverence, and wit, The Loves of My Life is the culmination of a legend's life and work, a delightful and moving tour of over seventy years of being unabashedly gay and in love with love in all its forms.
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Does not compare favorably to White's other books
- By Reader X on 04-03-25
By: Edmund White
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Alibis
- Essays on Elsewhere
- By: André Aciman
- Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini
- Length: 6 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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Celebrated as one of the most poignant stylists of his generation, André Aciman has written a luminous series of linked essays about time, place, identity, and art that show him at his very finest. From beautiful and moving pieces about the memory evoked by the scent of lavender; to meditations on cities like Barcelona, Rome, Paris, and New York; to his sheer ability to unearth life secrets from an ordinary street corner, Alibis reminds the listener that Aciman is a master of the personal essay.
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Absolutely a favorite
- By Kalindi Bellach on 01-20-23
By: André Aciman
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Salt Houses
- By: Hala Alyan
- Narrated by: Leila Buck
- Length: 12 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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On the eve of her daughter Alia's wedding, Salma reads the girl's future in a cup of coffee dregs. She sees an unsettled life for Alia and her children; she also sees travel, and luck. While she chooses to keep her predictions to herself that day, they will all soon come to pass when the family is uprooted in the wake of the Six-Day War of 1967.
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A Palestinian Family in Exile
- By zaina on 08-25-17
By: Hala Alyan
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Our Evenings
- A Novel
- By: Alan Hollinghurst
- Narrated by: Prasanna Puwanarajah
- Length: 16 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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Dave Win, the son of a Burmese man he’s never met and a British dressmaker, is thirteen years old when he gets a scholarship to a top boarding school. With the doors of elite English society cracked open for him, heady new possibilities emerge, even as Dave is exposed to the envy and viciousness of his wealthy classmates.
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Sublime Collaboration
- By Phip Herrick on 11-20-24
What listeners say about Enigma Variations
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Swellguy22
- 03-24-25
Wanted to love it, ended dissapointed.
I love André Aciman's writing and how he's able to transport you to landscapes you've never visited before. I just did not fall in love with this particular book. Perhaps because I felt Paul's character deceitful and immature. Always looking for an idea of love that he'd already known. An endless search that can only leave you mentally exhausted and physically drained. At what point do we stop looking for perfection and realize it doesn't exist ?
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