FictionReviewThe author of the gay cult classic Call Me By Your Name explores one man’s life through his erotic fixations
Here is a novel that delivers on its title: these variations on a theme do amount to an enigma. André Aciman is a multilingual American writer and academic who grew up in Egypt, France and Italy, and is best known for Call Me By Your Name, the 2007 debut that became a bestseller and a successful film a decade after publication. Pronounced an instant gay classic, it tells the story of an affair between a teenage boy and a more experienced man. All temptation and devastation over one hot Italian summer, it’s a narrative that appeals across the generations.
The Enigma Variations’ storyline is more blurred. Structured around five loosely linked sections that vary in length from novella to short story, this episodic work jumps in time, tense and place, each section exploring a different erotic fixation. Its anchor is the narrator, Paul, and at heart this is simply a depiction of one man’s history through his love life.
The longest and most significant section, First Love, is immediately reminiscent of Call Me By Your Name. We are in deeply familiar Aciman territory: a boy’s groin-aching longing for a man, sultry Italian weather and early love’s lifelong shaping of the psyche. The young Paul – his portrait scant on biographical fact, fully revelatory on the ways of the heart and libido – has spent his summers with his parents on an Italian island, and has returned 10 years later. “I’ve come back for him,” he says.
The object of desire is Ascanius, known as Nanni, a cabinet maker who has worked for Paul’s parents and failed to settle down with “one of those beefy, unshorn town girls”. Pubescent Paul develops an infatuation with this young man that is “unusual and stealthy, possibly unwholesome”, and slowly insinuates his way into his workshop to help out. A torment of unfulfilled desire results.
A thumping great daddy complex runs through this story, which is heavy with Freudian implications at every turn. “I wanted to be Ascanius. I wanted him to be my father, I wanted to leave and walk away with him.” In the present, Nanni has disappeared and Paul is now left with his memory, but also, in a jaw-dropping revelation, with the discovery of the real focus of his hero’s passions.
The slow, obsessive falling in love, the problems caused by Paul’s desires and ultimate betrayal, drive a lust-filled meditationAs ever, Aciman’s evocation of weather, emotional subtlety and time passing is wonderful. The narrative moves seamlessly into earlier years: the past is the present, the present the past. This Proustian meander captures truths about the contradictory drives of romantic love, but the pace can be excruciatingly slow, and the lack of any real knowledge of who or what Paul is creates a constant sensation of something missing.
The next section, Spring Fever, makes a tonal leap, and could almost be the work of another writer. It is a sharper, more modern, present-tense urban tale. The adult Paul is living in New York with a woman called Maud. He spots her in a restaurant with a companion and his jealousy becomes overwhelming. The story revolves around a dinner party, and the build-up of Paul’s pain is affecting, the ambling plot lifting towards another great twist – Aciman is a master of these. The existence of a handsome tennis player has been cunningly inserted in Spring Fever, and the character becomes central to the next chapter.
This is a man – called Manfred, in case we miss the fact that he’s a man. The slow, obsessive falling in love, the problems caused by Paul’s desires and ultimate betrayal, drive a lust-filled meditation containing echoes of Proust and of Elgar’s music. There is little actual sex in these tales of desire: most of the action takes place in the narrator’s mind. As Paul says: “God only knows what I would have invented once seized by the urge to touch another human being.”
The complete lack of attention paid to Paul’s sexual orientation is refreshingly contemporary. Desire is all, categorisation redundant. The final two sections revolve around an on-off affair with a married woman met in youth, and an all-consuming email affair with a much younger writer. Love is unattainable, thwarted, never quite fulfilled.
The absence of a conventional sense of story or structure reflects the musical form that Aciman is invoking, making this a clever experiment but also a frustrating one. For all its author’s indisputable talents, Enigma Variations creates, deliberately or otherwise, a sense of unfinished business.
Joanna Briscoe’s latest novel Touched is published by Arrow. Enigma Variations is published by Faber. To order a copy for £11.43 (RRP £12.99) go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
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