Andre Aciman's "Enigma Variations"

I really enjoyed Andre Aciman's Enigma Variations. He creates such a beautiful world that you really don't want to put the book down. I couldn't necessarily identify with all of his character's romantic situations, but they all took place in a lovely scene.

It also struck me as a very lovely story about bisexuality, which isn't frequently in the spotlight.

Some highlights:

(First, After the protagonist's mother finds her deceased father-in-law's cufflinks):

"This is the cruel thing about the dead. They come back in ways that always catch us off guard, don't they, Signor Giovanni?" Mother said.

"Yes," he agreed. "Sometimes, just wanting to tell them something that would have mattered to them, or to ask about people and places only they would have known about, reminds us that they'll never hear us, won't answer, don't care. But perhaps it's much worse for them: maybe they are the ones calling out to us and it is we who can't listen and don't seem to care."

(Later in the book, into another 'variation,' when he's at dinner and reminiscing about a seminar he took with an old friend.):

"Edith Wharton," I continued, "had lived in New England a great portion of her life and yet suddenly, because of an affair with someone who was not her husband, at the age of forty-six she penned these nine words in her diary: I have drunk the wine of life at last. Old Brit [the professor] loved that sentence. 'Think of the courage it takes to say such a thing to yourself at an age when most people have long drunk and sobered up from the wine of life. And think of the despair in her last two words - at last - as though she had all but given up and was ever grateful to this man who appeared in her life in the nick of time.'

"After mulling over his own words, Old Brit asked how many of us had actually drunk from the wine of life. 

"Most in the room raised their hands, thoroughly persuaded they'd experienced life-changing bliss. Only two failed to raise their hands."

"Me and you," she said, after a moment of silence, as thought that said it all, had always said it all. Silence hovered over our table.

"Actually, a third hand didn't go up that evening," I finally said.

"I don't remember a third hand."

"Ole Brit himself." 

[Much later in the book, he tells the story of how slept with Ole Brit, years later...]

I said, 'I think you should sleep with me.' 'That's an idea,' he said, startled yet placid as ever, 'and when should this be?' he asked in his typical way of giving a humorous spin to things. But I wasn't going to let him off the hook. 'Tonight.' I'd never in my life been so certain of myself or so peremptory. 'Are you so sure?' he asked. Once again he tried to put me off. I found the right words to reassure him: "Yes, tonight. I'll take care of everything, I promise.' And because a dead silence fell between us, I still remember repeating I promise.  He reached over to me and held my face with both his hands and brought it close to his. 'I've thought of this from the very first time I met you. Paul.' 'I didn't know,' I said. I was more baffled by this admission than by anything I had said to him. 'Changed your mine?' he asked, putting a smile on his face. 'Not at all,' I said, more scared than I thought I'd be, because I suddenly realized that, despite the hasty, untrammeled sex I'd knoow, I had never made love to a man before and that this was what he was offering. When I led him upstairs to my room, he didn't enter right away. I thought he was nervous, but now I think he was giving me a change to change my mind. I didn't turn on the light and began taking off my sweater. But he was naked before I was; he embraced me and started to remove everyting I was wearing. I lost tracke of waht we were doing. I was far more nervous than he. He ended up taking care of me.

It's a beautiful story. I love the way Aciman chose to wrote it all in one long paragraph of back and forth conversation, which somehow builds the sexual energy of the story.

Later, we meet a woman he is infatuated with, who writes emails in a very direct way, but her other prose is intricate:

I had read one of her articles and knew how complicated her mind was; I loved her complicated mind. Her prose reminded me of a warren of arcane, sporadic lanes in the West Village that take sudden turns and are perennially ahead of you. On e-mail, however, she spoke the polished language of the tree-lined grands boulevards of Paris, all clarity and transparency, no hidden corners, no false trails, no dead ends. You could always choose to overinterpret the meaning of so much clarity,  but then you'd be reading your own pulse, not hers.